Janet Fitch Quotes

The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box.

A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. But I didn't want to start. I knew how it would play. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.

This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment only to be washed away.

I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, men who made you love them then changed their minds.

A book's flaws make it less predictable.

As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I've waited all my life for the computer.

My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.

She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress

I've been depressed many times in my life. But under it all I'm an optimist.

Wasn't that the way it always was? You didn't know, you couldn't tell, you just let it happen... Perhaps they didn't know themselves. Sometimes the line was very fine.

It's all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.

The stupid things you say in the rain, that can't ever be washed away.

You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal.

Love could never bloom in a concrete block room.

Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold.

she was such a bad actress. she never said her lines rite, it was something perverse in her nature. and wat was her line anyway?

purification in fire. public cremation

No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.

I felt suddenly cruel, like I´d told dmall children there was no tooth fairy, that it was just their Mom sneaking into their room after they went to bed.

What can she possibly teach you, twenty seven names for tears?

How many people ask you to come share their life?

I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.

He reminded me of someone who put your fingers in the door and smiled and talked to you while he smashed them.

Dawn tinted the darkness like water ink.

It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.

If sinners where so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?

And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.

Reading LOVE JUNKIE is like watching a sleepwalker taking a stroll on a freeway. All you can do is pray. Gorgeously written, piercingly honest.

She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I'm so lonely, so desperate. I'll give you whatever you want.

How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached myself to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention.

And if there is no god? You act as if there is, and it's the same thing.

That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she'd never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.

We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.

Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

They say drugs are not the answer, but really, what is the question?

One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.

she’s not as pretty as you,” I said “But she’s a simpler girl,” my mother whispered.

without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life.

It's not that he was going nowhere, it's that he'd already arrived.

Love's an illusion. It's a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I'd rather have cash.

For she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame.

Only peons made excusses for themselves she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.

But I knew one more thing. That people w ho denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.

Whenever she thought she could not feel more alone, the universe peeled back another layer of darkness.

In our exterior life, we can be only one person. But in our imagination, we can be anyone, anywhere.

We read so that we can be moved by a new way of looking at things.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.