Top 300 Janet Fitch Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Wait for me, you said. Then left me alone in the echoing world.”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

268. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

272. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “Meredith’s father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself.”

— Janet Fitch

291. “Claire smiled with relief that my mother had made the first move. She didn’t understand the nature of poisons. My.”

— Janet Fitch

292. “Four was difficult and misunderstood, a genius before its time, it belonged to the planet of unexpected disaster.”

— Janet Fitch

293. “People just wanted to be loved. That.”

— Janet Fitch

294. “Loneliness ia a human condition.”

— Janet Fitch

295. “I lay on my mattress on the screen porch and waited for him to leave, watching the blue of the evening turn velvet, indigo lingering like an unspoken hope, while my mother and the blond man murmured on the other side of the screens. Incense perfumed the air, a special kind she bought in Little Tokyo, without any sweetness, expensive.”

— Janet Fitch

296. “It made me hopefully, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.”

— Janet Fitch

297. “It was one thing to hope, but you had to take care of yourself in the present, or you wouldn’t survive.”

— Janet Fitch

298. “And suddenly I felt panic. I’d made a mistake, like when I’d played chess with Ray and knew a second too late I’d made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn’t afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn’t want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn’t need to see it, the hideous eyelets albino creature that lived underneath.”

— Janet Fitch

299. “It was true, Jeremy took advantage. And she let him. It was his film, and she really didn’t care. It was just a body, like a rented suit. Michael had tried to make her feel differently about herself, that it wasn’t just for use by others, it was hers, she belonged to herself, she had to occupy herself.”

— Janet Fitch

300. “I knew one more thing. That people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger. They were blind sleepwalkers on tightropes, fingers scoring thin air.”

— Janet Fitch