Top 300 Janet Fitch Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, men who made you love them then changed their minds.”

— Janet Fitch

52. “They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled... mother’s big enough, wide enough for us to hide in... mother’s who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.”

— Janet Fitch

53. “What can she possibly teach you, twenty seven names for tears?”

— Janet Fitch

54. “Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.”

— Janet Fitch

55. “And in one drawer, twenty-seven names for tears. Heartdew. Griefhoney. Sadwater. Die Tranen. Eau de douleur. Los rios del corazon.”

— Janet Fitch

56. “I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.”

— Janet Fitch

57. “Well, the universe had spoken. There was no one left to turn to.”

— Janet Fitch

58. “Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.”

— Janet Fitch

59. “If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”

— Janet Fitch

60. “What happened to a dream without a dreamer?”

— Janet Fitch

61. “She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I’m so lonely, so desperate. I’ll give you whatever you want.”

— Janet Fitch

62. “Death like a lover, caressing him, promising him peace, running its fingers through his hair, its tongue in his ear. She put her own two fingers in her mouth. Im so sorry. And pulled the trigger.”

— Janet Fitch

63. “Beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.”

— Janet Fitch

64. “You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.”

— Janet Fitch

65. “I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children between friends family things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost more easily than anyone could imagine.”

— Janet Fitch

66. “She kissed me on the mouth. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and I was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. I was confused, but not unwilling. I would have let her do anything to me.”

— Janet Fitch

67. “I could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn’t seem to feel the chill.”

— Janet Fitch

68. “The sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.”

— Janet Fitch

69. “In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.”

— Janet Fitch

70. “The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I.”

— Janet Fitch

71. “Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn’t see possibilities. Then came despair.”

— Janet Fitch

72. “His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.”

— Janet Fitch

73. “The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.”

— Janet Fitch

74. “Just a beginner, but he learned so fast. Everything came so damn easy to him. Not true. The hard things cam easy. But the easy things he found impossibly hard.”

— Janet Fitch

75. “I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.”

— Janet Fitch

76. “Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins.”

— Janet Fitch

77. “I’ve told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.”

— Janet Fitch

78. “That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she’d never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.”

— Janet Fitch

79. “I almost said, you’re not broken, you’re just going through something. But i couldn’t. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn’t worked...”

— Janet Fitch

80. “Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately?”

— Janet Fitch

81. “Now I wish she’d never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.”

— Janet Fitch

82. “Only peons made excusses for themselves she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.”

— Janet Fitch

83. “Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.”

— Janet Fitch

84. “She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress.”

— Janet Fitch

85. “If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.”

— Janet Fitch

86. “A cliche is everything you’ve ever heard of.”

— Janet Fitch

87. “The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”

— Janet Fitch

88. “A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it.”

— Janet Fitch

89. “Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.”

— Janet Fitch

90. “Her body felt like it’d been beaten with a hose. This must be what it felt like to get old. It wasn’t that your body fell apart from living so long. It was that you had to take so many stompings from life that you’d be happy when the time came to close your eyes and never open them again.”

— Janet Fitch

91. “What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.”

— Janet Fitch

92. “Who are you? the band sang. I tried to remember but I really couldn’t say.”

— Janet Fitch

93. “Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that’s something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It’s hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.”

— Janet Fitch

94. “We have no home, she told me. I am your home.”

— Janet Fitch

95. “I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.”

— Janet Fitch

96. “When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.”

— Janet Fitch

97. “I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.”

— Janet Fitch

98. “Well, anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon’s charcoal neck.”

— Janet Fitch

99. “It’s their skins I’m peeling,” she said. “The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.”

— Janet Fitch

100. “If sinners where so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?”

— Janet Fitch