Top 300 Janet Fitch Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Her voice made me drunk, deep and sun-warmed, a hint of a foreign accent, Swedish singsong a generation removed.”

— Janet Fitch

152. “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

153. “His voice was cloves and nightingales.”

— Janet Fitch

154. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

158. “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

159. “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

160. “I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It frightened me for Claire to bare her needs so openly. If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away. I didn’t need to put mirrors on the roof to know that.”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

169. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

175. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

178. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

189. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

195. “I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I’d cried all I could and it wasn’t enough.”

— Janet Fitch

196. “I’ve been depressed many times in my life. But under it all I’m an optimist.”

— Janet Fitch

197. “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

198. “The pine shadows moved across my blanket, the wall behind me. People were just like that. We couldn’t even see each other, just the shadows moving, pushed by unseen winds.”

— Janet Fitch

199. “We parked in back and walked down the stairs with their polished brass railings, past the old-fashioned kitchen. We could see the chefs cooking. It smelled like stew, or meat loaf, the way time should smell, solid and nourishing.”

— Janet Fitch

200. “She wanted to know all about me, what I was like, who I was. I worried, there wasn’t really much to tell. I had no preferences. I ate anything, wore anything, sat where you told me, slept where you said. I was infinitely adaptable.”

— Janet Fitch