Top 300 Janet Fitch Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

255. “You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.”

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

— Janet Fitch

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

267. “It’s a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you’re worth.”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

270. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

272. “She was a woman for whom a man would buy a diamond ring or a new car, just to cheer her up.”

— 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. “She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot.”

— Janet Fitch

275. “High-voltage wires stretched between steel towers like giants holding jump ropes into the distance.”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “Reverend Thomas said that in hell, the sinners were indifferent to the suffering of others, it was part of damnation. I hadn’t understood that until now.”

— Janet Fitch

283. “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

284. “I was bad, I had done bad things, I had hurt people, and the worst of it was, I didn’t want to stop. Blue.”

— Janet Fitch

285. “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

286. “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

287. “But she understood, even lies could be true, if you knew how to listen.”

— Janet Fitch

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

293. “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

294. “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

295. “I imagined myself a professor’s daughter, riding a bike to my classes. I could wear a camel’s hair coat at last, have a roommate, play intramural volleyball, all paid for in advance.”

— Janet Fitch

296. “She never seemed more complete, more sure of herself. Not trying to please anyone anymore. Page 292.”

— Janet Fitch

297. “She couldn’t help but think how Michael would have loved this old man. He loved when people talked to him like this, just regular people. It made him feel human, connected, if someone was comfortable talking to him, saw him as an ordinary man, perhaps he wasn’t as estranged from the world as he felt himself to be.”

— Janet Fitch

298. “Mother prescribing her books like medicines. A good dose of Whitman would set me straight, like castor oil. But at least she was thinking of me. I existed once more.”

— Janet Fitch

299. “It was as if I was blind and she’d told me, sight doesn’t matter, it’s just as well you can’t see.”

— Janet Fitch

300. “Mother prescribing her books like medicines. A good dose of Whitman would set me straight, like caster oil.”

— Janet Fitch