Top 300 Janet Fitch Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.”

— Janet Fitch

252. “It was safer in here, there were rules and regular meals, professional care. Mac was a floor you could not fall below. I supposed the ex-cons who kept going back to prison felt the same way. “You.”

— Janet Fitch

253. “He just didn’t want to see how damaged she was. As long as she didn’t show him, that was all he asked for. A good show.”

— Janet Fitch

254. “He could sense the ridiculousness of life even as it tore the guts out of him. She saw that now. And death lay coiled in the dark between the perception and the pain.”

— Janet Fitch

255. “The smell of the smoke always brought me back to my mother, to a rooftop under an untrustworthy moon. How beautiful she had been, how perfectly unhinged.”

— Janet Fitch

256. “I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of water, the chink of dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the tree, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I.”

— Janet Fitch

257. “She wished Michael had had a grandfather like this guy Morty, someone to tell him, “It’s a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you’re worth.” Instead of one who showed him how to die.”

— Janet Fitch

258. “I looked at my life and saw quite clearly that I was not surviving it in the turquoise house. I was letting my sails crust up with salt. I had to stop playing johnny johnny and concentrate on preparing for rain, preparing for rescue.”

— Janet Fitch

259. “She yearned to call him, but hated the sound of the phone ringing, ringing, knowing that he might be standing right there, not picking up, knowing it was her.”

— Janet Fitch

260. “My words, that’s what she wanted. What’s this? she kept asking. What’s this? But how could I tell her? She’d taken all the words.”

— Janet Fitch

261. “You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you.”

— Janet Fitch

262. “Weren’t chains ashamed of their prisoners? But.”

— Janet Fitch

263. “But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?”

— Janet Fitch

264. “Don’t tell me how you hate your new foster home. If they’re not beating you, consider yourself lucky.”

— Janet Fitch

265. “The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain. I.”

— Janet Fitch

266. “The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw.”

— Janet Fitch

267. “Her name was Lost. Her name was Nobody’s Daughter.”

— Janet Fitch

268. “We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water. I.”

— Janet Fitch

269. “I liked the shifting colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next. They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe watched on a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?”

— Janet Fitch

270. “Loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.”

— Janet Fitch

271. “It felt so good to be high. I felt the lid of the pencil-gray sky lift and I could breathe, I didn’t dread the rest of the afternoon now.”

— Janet Fitch

272. “Like Berlin, I was layered with guilt and destruction. I had caused grief as well as suffering it. I could never honestly point a finger without it turning around in mid-accusation. Olivia.”

— Janet Fitch

273. “They congratulated themselves and went back out to their sodas and Chex mix, leaving me in front of the mirror, a toddler’s fussed-over Barbie abandoned in the sandbox. I blinked back my tears and forced myself to look in the mirror. Looking.”

— Janet Fitch

274. “I was the center of my own universe, it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around me, and I liked the way he looked at me.”

— Janet Fitch

275. “I wasn’t beautiful anymore. Now I looked like what I was, a raw wound.”

— Janet Fitch

276. “It made me feel dizzy, like I wanted to grab hold of something heavy and hang on. This was the life I was going to be living, everyone separated from everyone else, hanging on for a moment, only to be washed away. I could grow up and drift away too. My mother might never know where I was, and in a few years, if someone asked her about me, she might shrug like this and say, “Haven’t seen her in two, three years.”

— Janet Fitch

277. “It wasn’t like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn’t learned yet, there was not such thing as an empty canvas.”

— Janet Fitch

278. “Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It.”

— Janet Fitch

279. “The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain. Gasping.”

— Janet Fitch

280. “All that remodeling. She never wondered where the money came from. Six girls bought a lot of remodeling, even antiques, especially if you didn’t feed them. I.”

— Janet Fitch

281. “The Fool, the Zero card, dressed in motley, dazzled face to the sky, foot about to come off the cliff. Pierrot. It wasn’t Michael at all. It was her. You fool... And which one was he? The Magician? She’d thought he was. She’d thought he had it all lined up. The world spinning on his little finger. Or else the Hermit with his lantern, looking for the true world. But no, here he was. The twelfth card. The Hanged Man. Lashed upside down to his cross tree. Unable to go backward or forward.”

— Janet Fitch

282. “He was obsessed with obituaries. She’d never read them before, he couldn’t believe it, to him it was like someone who’d never read the funnies... Michael always wanted to know what they died of- accidental gunshot wounds, overdose, cancer. ‘Was it suicide?’ That’s what he really wanted to know.”

— Janet Fitch

283. “Don’t you let them forget about you,” she said. But this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe.”

— Janet Fitch

284. “Everybody left you eventually. He.”

— Janet Fitch

285. “On the cover that leaned against the dirty couch, John and Yoko pressed together for a kiss they would never finish. People were always trashing Yoko Ono, blaming her for breaking up the Beatles, but Josie knew they were just jealous that John preferred Yoko to some bloated megaband. Nobody ever loved a lover. Because love was a private party, and nobody got on the guest list.”

— Janet Fitch

286. “She closed the magazine and stared at the girl on the cover, a girl who had never been pregnant, never had a social worker or a filling. Yvonne stroked the water-wavy cover. I could tell, she wanted to know what that girl knew, feel how she felt, to be so beautiful, wanted, confident. Like people touching the statue of a saint.”

— Janet Fitch

287. “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. We.”

— Janet Fitch

288. “I was torn and stitched, I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.”

— Janet Fitch

289. “IT DIDN’T TAKE ME long to figure out why the girls called Amelia Cruella De Vil. In the beautiful wooden house, we went hungry all the time.”

— Janet Fitch

290. “She kept thinking about it as Jeremy talked about his Concept for the movie, the locations, some house off Sunset Plaza he pronounced “total Sixties, it’ll blow your mind.” She imagined walking into the house and blowing her head off.”

— Janet Fitch

291. “Now it seemed unbelievable, the innocence of a girl in a fairy tale.”

— Janet Fitch

292. “I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she’d tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you’re ever going to. Look around. It’s all downhill from here.”

— Janet Fitch

293. “That was how you did it. You let go, you left all that behind, you refused to remember. You let the dark in.”

— Janet Fitch

294. “I learned, whatever you hung from my earlobes or out on my back, I was insoluble, like same in water. Stir me up, I always rest on the bottom.”

— Janet Fitch

295. “A magician came to entertain us, and I was mesmerized by his beautiful hands, his fluid, round gestures. I couldn’t stop watching his hands. They were better than any of his tricks. He pulled a bouquet of paper flowers out of the air and gave them to me with a courtly bow, and I thought love was like that, pulled out of the air, something bright and unlikely.”

— Janet Fitch

296. “Carolee bought me a mirror for my purse and Owen and Peter gave me a lizard in a jar with a bow. From Davey I got a big sheet of cardboard on which he’d taped animal scat and Xeroxes of animal tracks to match, with carefully printed labels.”

— Janet Fitch

297. “Her violence. Claire, what did you know about violence? My mother’s strength? Well she wasn’t strong enough to avoid being the background of my art. Just the background. Her words just my canvas.”

— Janet Fitch

298. “The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality, your touch, pressure, the authority of your movement.”

— Janet Fitch

299. “The future was a white fog into which I would vanish, unmarked by the flourish of rustling taffeta blue and gold. No mother to guide me. I.”

— Janet Fitch

300. “And it occurred to Josie how tortured Michael must have been by the way his mother’s gift just flowed out of her, so clear and certain and unobstructed, like a spring. How painful it must have been for him to watch this. Michael had that genius, maybe even more than Meredith, but couldn’t let it out like that. Just pour it out. And no matter how good he was, even if he was the one picked out of a whole show, he could never feel it. He could do everything except find a way to satisfaction.”

— Janet Fitch