Top 300 Janet Fitch Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?”

— Janet Fitch

152. “I tried on Claire’s double strand of pearls in the mirror, ran the smooth, lustrous beads through my fingers, touched the coral rose of the clasp. The pearls weren’t really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn’t come apart.”

— Janet Fitch

153. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

155. “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

156. “I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.”

— Janet Fitch

157. “She was starting to think there might be such a thing as karma – that repetition – maybe you lived through the same thing over and over until you stopped caring. Maybe eventually it got less intense, until it was just nothing.”

— Janet Fitch

158. “Her voice made me drunk, deep and sun-warmed, a hint of a foreign accent, Swedish singsong a generation removed.”

— Janet Fitch

159. “Pick a better verb. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an A-bomb.”

— Janet Fitch

160. “To make films, you have to have boundless energy; you have to work and play with others really, really well, and I’m really a more contemplative kind of person. I like to sit at home and think, a lot.”

— Janet Fitch

161. “I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favourite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.”

— Janet Fitch

162. “Whenever she thought she could not feel more alone, the universe peeled back another layer of darkness.”

— Janet Fitch

163. “All that was a dream, you couldn’t hold on, you couldn’t depend on frosted glass and Debussy.”

— Janet Fitch

164. “As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I’ve waited all my life for the computer.”

— Janet Fitch

165. “I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots – prostitute, housewife, saint – like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.”

— Janet Fitch

166. “Reading LOVE JUNKIE is like watching a sleepwalker taking a stroll on a freeway. All you can do is pray. Gorgeously written, piercingly honest.”

— Janet Fitch

Featured in: Reading Quotes

167. “The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. ‘You ask me about regret? 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 between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I’ve given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine.”

— Janet Fitch

168. “I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don’t even know what’s going on with me until I’m writing. That doesn’t mean my books are autobiographical.”

— Janet Fitch

169. “I think that Oprah’s on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.”

— Janet Fitch

Featured in: Reading Quotes

170. “No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.”

— Janet Fitch

171. “We don’t have a unitary society anymore, you know; it’s very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.”

— Janet Fitch

172. “Love could never bloom in a concrete block room.”

— Janet Fitch

173. “Now was too big, like a giant dark planet coming up over the horizon. she wanted then. That’s what he’d seen that day, a brightness with darkness all around, watching her, as if she were glamorous, as if she were a rare and mysterious creature.”

— Janet Fitch

174. “I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn’t used to being so complicated.”

— Janet Fitch

175. “I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her.”

— Janet Fitch

176. “We tried not to be in the same room at the same time when Starr was home, we set the air on fire between us.”

— Janet Fitch

177. “Nature was always there, no matter what.”

— Janet Fitch

178. “And if there is no god? You act as if there is, and it’s the same thing.”

— Janet Fitch

179. “Father turned on me as if blackbirds had flown out of my mouth.”

— Janet Fitch

180. “She usually loved this band, but today their cheerfulness made her want to crash the car.”

— Janet Fitch

181. “It’s the difference between a true artist and everybody else.” Claire sighed. “They can remake the world.”

— Janet Fitch

182. “Maybe that was the only real truth about the world, that there was no answer, that wisdom and experience were no better than a flat-out roll of the dice.”

— Janet Fitch

183. “I wanted to put words between us, like spikes, to keep myself from falling into him like a girl without bones.”

— Janet Fitch

184. “How many people ask you to come share their life?”

— Janet Fitch

185. “Those who love poetry, even my unreadable foreign brand, are a tender breed.”

— Janet Fitch

186. “My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.”

— Janet Fitch

187. “I’ll tell you this: history is the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall. It groans. It smells like ozone before a storm.”

— Janet Fitch

188. “No one considered that a key might lock as well as unlock.”

— Janet Fitch

189. “I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do ’cause then at least I would’ve done what I wanted to do in life. What’s that worth?”

— Janet Fitch

190. “It’s magic, Astrid. You have to know how to reach up and pull beauty out of thin air.”

— Janet Fitch

191. “I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.”

— Janet Fitch

192. “His trips home were handholds for her, so she could swing from one square on the calendar to the next. When he said he was going to come home and didn’t, she swung forward and grasped thin air, fell.”

— Janet Fitch

193. “A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. But I didn’t want to start. I knew how it would play. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.”

— Janet Fitch

194. “The stupid things you say in the rain, that can’t ever be washed away.”

— Janet Fitch

195. “There were lockouts, bread riots. And absurdly, I turned seventeen right in the middle of it all. Ridiculous. An insult to celebrate such a thing when the whole country was sliding into the abyss.”

— Janet Fitch

196. “She was sorry to have hurt her, but she wanted them all to leave her alone, let her keep it together. 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

197. “So now I was supposed to feel pity for you and those other women who’d lost their own children during a holdup, a murder, a fiesta of greed? Save your poet’s sympathy and find some better believer. Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.”

— Janet Fitch

198. “What is real is always worth it.”

— Janet Fitch

199. “This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment only to be washed away.”

— Janet Fitch

200. “A cliche is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.”

— Janet Fitch