Top 300 Janet Fitch Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

203. “If this was a sandalwood pyre she would have thrown herself in and this paper she’d become would have caught fire and she and him could sail away like two birds.”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

206. “On the anvil of August, the city lay paralyzed, stunned into stupidity by the heat.”

— Janet Fitch

207. “I saw that miracles were shocking, as overwhelming as disasters.”

— Janet Fitch

208. “But I knew one more thing. That people w ho denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.”

— Janet Fitch

209. “Rena noticed me watching it pass. ‘You think they don’t got problem?’ Rena said. ‘Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.’ She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. ‘We are the free birds. They want to be us.”

— Janet Fitch

210. “When you’re a little kid, you are small, your life is small – and you’re terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.”

— Janet Fitch

211. “I lay my Webster’s on the scrubbed table in the lantern light, to learn that flotsam is the debris left from shipwreck, while jetsam is merchandise thrown overboard from a ship in crisis to lighten the load.”

— Janet Fitch

212. “I felt on the verge of something, a mystery that surrounded me like gauze, something I was beginning to unwind.”

— Janet Fitch

213. “The ridiculous way we thought male, female, as pants or skirt. Suddenly, the whole sexual universe and its conventions seemed fantastic, contrived.”

— Janet Fitch

214. “Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.”

— Janet Fitch

215. “She was not used to being cruel, but he had taught her how.”

— Janet Fitch

216. “That was Ingrid Magnussen. She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they’d been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T’ang Dynasty.”

— Janet Fitch

217. “Never let a man stay the night,” she told me. “Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.”

— Janet Fitch

218. “I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn’t write again until I was a senior in college.”

— Janet Fitch

219. “A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter.”

— Janet Fitch

220. “You’ve been everywhere, haven’t you.” I had, but it hadn’t done me much good.”

— Janet Fitch

221. “A book’s flaws make it less predictable.”

— Janet Fitch

222. “Memory is the fourth landscape.”

— Janet Fitch

223. “I imagined Kandinsky’s mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.”

— Janet Fitch

224. “Claire made me think it was worth trying. Of course you took the honors classes. Of course you wore your jewelry. Of course you signed up for art classes at the museum. Of course. In.”

— Janet Fitch

225. “In stages, that’s how. First you let go of the things you loved.”

— Janet Fitch

226. “Being in the library is so addictive for me that I really have to exercise self-control so I can get some writing done at home.”

— Janet Fitch

227. “We stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand.”

— Janet Fitch

228. “One death did not salve another.”

— Janet Fitch

229. “That was the frightening part about believing in things. You could wake up one day and it could all be gone.”

— Janet Fitch

230. “She joked about her fears, but it was the kind of joke where you knew people thought it was ridiculous, and you pretended you thought so too, but underneath you were completely serious.”

— Janet Fitch

231. “I wondered where he was now whether I would ever hear him again. Whether someone would love him, someday show him what beauty mean’t.”

— Janet Fitch

232. “She thought she could justify anything, even murder, just because it was what she wanted.”

— Janet Fitch

233. “He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn’t know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked.”

— Janet Fitch

234. “This dumb show of privilege – the quartet, the stylized flowers of stained glass, the illumination of the skylights. Yet it was beautiful. Did beauty have to be shameful? I wished there was someone I could ask.”

— Janet Fitch

235. “But that was the thing about zero. Its weakness. Even if zero had taken over the entire universe, the biggest fascist of all, one tiny gesture could deny it. One footprint, one atom. You didn’t have to be a genius. You didn’t even have to know that was what you were doing. You made a mark. You changed something. It said, “A human being passed here.” And changed zero to one.”

— Janet Fitch

236. “She shouldn’t be allowed to walk around. She might hurt someone.”

— Janet Fitch

237. “I was more his child than he knew. But my womanhood had put a permanent barrier between us. He didn’t know how to be the father of a woman, and womanhood could not be undone. The future already a fact.”

— Janet Fitch

238. “Of course I did, I was blank, anyone could fill me in. I waited to see who I would be, what they would create on my delicious vacancy.”

— Janet Fitch

239. “He could see the flames in my hair, he knew my lips would scorch him.”

— Janet Fitch

240. “Things touched Claire. Maybe too much, but at least they touched her. She couldn’t twist things around in her mind, make the ends come out right.”

— Janet Fitch

241. “As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.”

— Janet Fitch

242. “When I’d been with Kolya, I’d been the moon, and he was the sun: he could give me his warmth or withhold it, pursue me or forget me.”

— Janet Fitch

243. “She was my life raft, my turtle.”

— Janet Fitch

244. “There was power in me now, where there had been none.”

— Janet Fitch

245. “He had bars on all the windows now. She stroked his new security door with the pads of her fingers like it was fur. “Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness.”

— Janet Fitch

246. “I didn’t want to remind her that I was the reason she was trapped in electric bills and kid’s shoes grown too small, the reason she was clawing at the windows like Michaels dying tomatoes. 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

247. “How many children had this happened to? How many children were like me, floating like plankton in the wide ocean?”

— Janet Fitch

248. “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

249. “My mother was not herself in the time of the Santa Anas. I was twelve years old and I was afraid for her.”

— Janet Fitch

250. “Wait for me, you said. Then left me alone in the echoing world.”

— Janet Fitch