Top 300 Janet Fitch Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “We have no home, she told me. I am your home.”

— Janet Fitch

102. “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

103. “Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.”

— Janet Fitch

104. “Love is a check, that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.”

— Janet Fitch

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

108. “I’d spent the last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I wouldn’t drip with blood every time I brushed up against something.”

— Janet Fitch

109. “I love Derrick Brown for the surprise of one word waking up next to another. One moment tender, funny or romantic, the next, visceral, ironic and relevatory-here is the full chaos of life. An amazing talent.”

— Janet Fitch

110. “This ragged heart,” she said, pulling at her kimono. “I should rip it out and bury it for compost.”

— Janet Fitch

111. “The secret is – a magician doesn’t buy magic. Admire the skill of a magician, but never fall under his spell.” She rose and collected our glasses. And I thought of how Barry seduced my mother, his smoked mirrors and hidden trained doves. She never chose him, not really, but she gave him everything. She would always be his, even if he was dead. He had shaped her destiny.”

— Janet Fitch

112. “I couldn’t imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn’t dare.”

— Janet Fitch

113. “What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?”

— Janet Fitch

114. “Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew in huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren’t worth as much. It was the emerald that didn’t break that was the really valuable thing.”

— Janet Fitch

115. “Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold.”

— Janet Fitch

116. “I hate people,” he said, wiping the urchin’s face with the rag. “Animals are more noble. Look at this boy. He’s poor and desperate, but can they see it? Can they pity him? No. They should embrace him. They should save their kicks and blows for the bastards who keep them so poor, who set them on each other like dogs.”

— Janet Fitch

117. “Darkness coiled between what he wanted them to believe and the self he despised. It only made him more alone. How could you save someone when he didn’t let you kno him? What a waste. The beauty he murdered in this place. He could never see what he had, only what he failed to achieve.”

— Janet Fitch

118. “I was the center of my own universe it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around new, and I liked the way he looked at me l. Who had ever looked at me, who had ever noticed me? If this was evil, let God change my mind.”

— Janet Fitch

119. “Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.”

— Janet Fitch

120. “My freckles felt like they would burst into flame.”

— Janet Fitch

121. “I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter’s hand.”

— Janet Fitch

122. “I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.”

— Janet Fitch

123. “For she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame.”

— Janet Fitch

124. “My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.”

— Janet Fitch

125. “Abdication, a great brass bell, solemn, resonant, deafening.”

— Janet Fitch

126. “She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.”

— Janet Fitch

127. “That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He’d have had to change his whole philosophy. The.”

— Janet Fitch

128. “They can’t touch us. We’re the Vikings. We go into battle without armor for the flush and the blood of it.”

— Janet Fitch

129. “I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.”

— Janet Fitch

130. “Crows squawked raucously in the trees. It sounded like they were tearing something apart, something they didn’t even want, just for the fun of destroying it.”

— Janet Fitch

131. “It wasn’t awful to be dead. The stillness would almost be a relief. She wouldn’t want pain, she wouldn’t want to be wounded or mutilated. She could never shoot herself or jump off a building. But being dead wasn’t unthinkable.”

— Janet Fitch

132. “Many women get involved with a man that you pretty much know isn’t suitable and you’re kind of breaking your rules, but he’s attractive in some unknown way. And then he doesn’t even realize what a sacrifice you’re making by being with him and he dumps you!”

— Janet Fitch

133. “The damned could be saved, he said, anytime. But they refused to give up their sins. Though they suffered endlessly, they would not give them up, even for salvation, perfect divine love.”

— Janet Fitch

134. “She should think about her own soul, what she was going to do with this funky tattered pond dank item. Dark and stained, a ruined thing.”

— Janet Fitch

135. “A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.”

— Janet Fitch

136. “These people picked you up and played with you and then left you lying in the rain.”

— Janet Fitch

137. “A womans mistakes are different from a girls.”

— Janet Fitch

138. “She had forgotten about this, the narcotic of the crowd. This is why you came to hear music. To stop being yourself, to let that thing that you supposedly were go, and just be part of a mob, synchronized by the heavy beat, mesmerized by a singer with big smeary red lips, her spooky chant.”

— Janet Fitch

139. “But things coming out of her, visible to the world? It was in a strange way another loss. You gave things away you couldn’t afford to lose. Private things. You showed yourself and you couldn’t take it back.”

— Janet Fitch

140. “And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.”

— Janet Fitch

141. “I had been moving too fast. I had been too hungry to become a woman.”

— Janet Fitch

142. “He reminded me of someone who put your fingers in the door and smiled and talked to you while he smashed them.”

— Janet Fitch

143. “His voice was cloves and nightingales.”

— Janet Fitch

144. “I liked it when my mother tried to teach me things, when she paid attention. So often when I was with her, she was unreachable. Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.”

— Janet Fitch

145. “Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this lousy world.”

— Janet Fitch

146. “At every moment, each instrument knew what to play. Its little bit. But none could see the whole thing like this, all at once, only its own part. Just like life. Each person was like a line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score.”

— Janet Fitch

147. “It’s not that he was going nowhere, it’s that he’d already arrived.”

— Janet Fitch

148. “The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.”

— Janet Fitch

149. “How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?”

— Janet Fitch

150. “This is what happens when you fall in love. You’re looking at a natural disaster.”

— Janet Fitch