Top 300 Janet Fitch Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 7 of 7

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

— Janet Fitch

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “Everybody left you eventually. He.”

— Janet Fitch

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

332. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

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

— Janet Fitch

339. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

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

— Janet Fitch

345. “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