Top 300 Janet Fitch Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “They’d retreated to the country with two passports only. From the outside it looked like death. People could pound the walls all they wanted, but they’d never find the door. Nobody could guess at the gardens inside.”

— Janet Fitch

302. “So much for those gleanings from novels, from paintings, as if love were a matter of posing in picturesque dishabille. No. You went into it as a tiger encountering another tiger. You went into it like a person jumping off a bridge.”

— Janet Fitch

303. “It scared me when she said perfect. Perfect was always too much to ask.”

— Janet Fitch

304. “Her gut ached, as if love was being dug out of her with a dull knife.”

— Janet Fitch

305. “This was an artist’s stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions.”

— Janet Fitch

306. “You always said I knew nothing, but that was the place to begin. I would never claim to know what women in prison dreamed about, or the rights of beauty, or what the night’s magic held. If I thought for a second I did, I’d never have the chance to find out, to see it whole, to watch it emerge and reveal itself. I don’t have to put my face on every cloud, be the protagonist of every random event.”

— Janet Fitch

307. “She was drifting outside the limit of all reason, where the next stop was light-years away through nothing but darkness.”

— Janet Fitch

308. “Shot by a desperate fan. On the news, fans were always desperate. Got his signature and then shot him down. The saddest thing about it was that she wasn’t more shocked. To Josie, it just seemed part of the way things were heading, Ronald Reagan, greedheads running everything. Killing John Lennon seemed like just mopping up. Thirty thousand people missing in El Salvador, those nuns, and everybody in America was worried about who shot JR.”

— Janet Fitch

309. “Michael hated this, it was the worst thing he could imagine, disappearing into the mass- he didn’t know how to submerge himself, he was the puzzle piece that fit nowhere.”

— Janet Fitch

310. “What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of for Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale boulevard, making their moves with a great deck missing a written and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces.”

— Janet Fitch

311. “I felt helpless to prevent her life from taking its likely direction. Could a person save another person?”

— Janet Fitch

312. “Michael, in a motel in Twentynine Palms, a gun in his hands. Not at Meredith’s, painting in an explosion of new creation. Not over on Sunset, digging through the record bins, or at Launderland separating the darks and lights. Not at the Chinese market, looking at the fish with their still-bright eyes. Not at the Vista watching an old movie. Not sketching down at Echo Park. He was in a motel room in Twentynine Palms, putting a bullet in his brain.”

— Janet Fitch

313. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

317. “Loneliness ia a human condition.”

— Janet Fitch

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “Everybody left you eventually. He.”

— Janet Fitch

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

345. “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