Janet Fitch Quotes

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.

Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.

How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it.

It's such a liability to love another person.

Find someone who will tremble for your touch, someone whose fingers are a poem.

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

Beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.

Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battle ground.

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you

She should think about her own soul, what she was going to do with this funky tattered pond dank item. Dark and stained, a ruined thing.

How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?

Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.

A cliche is everything you've ever heard of.

Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.

This is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.

I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.

Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.

Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.

A cliché is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.

Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.

Love is a check, that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.

What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.

The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.

I wish my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.

Pick a better verb. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an A-bomb.

What happened to a dream without a dreamer?

The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.

I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

I wondered where he was now whether I would ever hear him again. Whether someone would love him, someday show him what beauty mean't.

Writing mirrors the interior self. You know, any book is like the perfect blueprint of the psyche of the author.

Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.

In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.

I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.

I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.

It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.

She’s never where she is,' I said. 'She’s only inside her head.

Don't hoard the past. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

After all the fears, the warnings, after all, a woman's mistakes are different from a girl's. They are written by fire on stone. They are a trait and not an error.

this was the wonderful thing about strangers. they were big blank pieces of paper, you could draw watever you like on their impresionable surfaces

When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.