Top 300 Janet Fitch Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

304. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

307. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

309. “Once the worst had happened to you, all the rest was just stuff and absence.”

— Janet Fitch

310. “Amelia liked me. She had me sit next to her and finish the food on her plate when she was done eating.”

— Janet Fitch

311. “I was graduating in two months, but I wasn’t to Pitzer, that was for sure. I was the old child, the past that had to burned away, so my mother, the phoenix, could emerge once again, a golden bird rising from the ash.”

— Janet Fitch

312. “But they weren’t small children, they were women, they were admiring someone they didn’t know the first thing about. Look at the hag Truth for once, college girl.”

— Janet Fitch

313. “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

314. “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

315. “All this time, masquerading as a nice, well-bred girl when I was a stream in flood, a length of fire, the fall of a hawk.”

— Janet Fitch

316. “She should have realized I was a bad luck person, she should never have thought I was someone to count on.”

— Janet Fitch

317. “It didn’t much matter where the path went, she wasn’t the least bit curious, she just needed a direction.”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

319. “But she was sure old Henry’d showed up with the other granola-heads, lit incense and rang finger cymbals and blew some pot, no doubt, in John’s memory. Om rama rama. Did John Lennon really want all that? Was that what he was about? From what she’d heard, the guy’d had some wit and brains – did he really want to be the dead guy of the hour, like a melting centerpiece?”

— Janet Fitch

320. “She could steal my soul. She was already doing it. But who else did I have, what other beauty was there?”

— Janet Fitch

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

327. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

338. “Loneliness ia a human condition.”

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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