Janet Fitch Quotes

Nineteen is as alive as 40-plus. I can vividly remember 19 and how I saw the world.

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

I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn't they just be bitter? They weren't like rattlesnakes, they didn't even eat what they killed. The way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn't want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn't a source of poison, but just another victim.

She was used to taking the world as it was, she'd never have guessed you could get what you wanted by asking for it.

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.

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

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

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.

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.

Like Berlin, I was layered with guilt and destruction. I had caused grief as well as suffering it. I could never honestly point a finger without it turning around in mid-accusation. Olivia

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

Rena noticed me watching it pass. 'You think they don't got problem?' Rena said. 'Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.' She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. 'We are the free birds. They want to be us.

The gamelan created in the listener a brain wave beyond all alphas and betas and thetas, a brain wave that paralyzed the normal channels of thought and forced new ones to grow outside them, in the untouched regions of the mind, like parallel blood vessels that form to accommodate a damaged heart.

On the anvil of August, the city lay paralyzed, stunned into stupidity by the heat.

I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.

What is a scene? a) A scene starts and ends in one place at one time (the Aristotelian unities of time and place-this stuff goes waaaayyyy back). b) A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted. c) Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next. Make something happen.

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.

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.

Never let a man stay the night," she told me. "Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.

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

This is Zen", she said. "No flaw, no moment's hesitation. A window onto grace.

She was starting to think there might be such a thing as karma - that repetition - maybe you lived through the same thing over and over until you stopped caring. Maybe eventually it got less intense, until it was just nothing.

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.

How had she ever been so ignorant? 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

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

He'd loved her, he had. And he knew she loved him, he knew it! But it wasn't enough. She couldn't have imagined such a thing was possible. Love wasn't enough

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.

While out on the perimeter, women discovered the freedom of badlands. They were curiously free to invent, without having to liberate themselves from the forms and rewards of the cultural norm.

L.A. is such a real, active place. My mother was very into the core of the city. She worked in politics, and you have to know your territory. It's an active matrix; we're all parts of it, but people don't often stop to wonder what's going on.

My father, that silhouette, a form comprised of all I did not
know, a shape filled with rain. Whenever I asked, she'd say, 'You
had no father. I'm your father. You sprang full-blown from my
forehead, like Athena.

Don't tell me how you hate your new foster home. If they're not beating you, consider yourself lucky.

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.

Many women get involved with a man that you pretty much know isn't suitable and you're kind of breaking your rules, but he's attractive in some unknown way. And then he doesn't even realize what a sacrifice you're making by being with him and he dumps you!

I love Derrick Brown for the surprise of one word waking up next to another. One moment tender, funny or romantic, the next, visceral, ironic and relevatory-here is the full chaos of life. An amazing talent.

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

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.

That was her edge. her secret weapon. she didnt give a shit.

I kept sending out stories and getting rejected.

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

Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest - where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

She sat in her chair, eyes closed. She liked to be the last one to leave. She despised crowds, and their opinions as they left a performance, or worse, discussed the wait for the bathroom or where do you want to eat. It spoiled her mood. She was still in that other world, she would stay there as long as she possibly could, the parallel channels twining and tunneling through her cortex like coral.

He hated crowds, never liked punk. He couldn't handle the nakedness of the rage -his own so sophisticated and finely tuned. He could never see the similarity between himself and Donnie Draino screaming into a mic.

Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good.

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.

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

She's not as pretty as you," I said
"But she's a simpler girl," my mother whispered.

There was power in me now, where there had been none.

But that was the thing about zero. Its weakness. Even if zero had taken over the entire universe, the biggest fascist of all, one tiny gesture could deny it. One footprint, one atom. You didn't have to be a genius. You didn't even have to know that was what you were doing. You made a mark. You changed something. It said, "A human being passed here." And changed zero to one.

I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do 'cause then at least I would've done what I wanted to do in life. What's that worth?

Women writers specifically ... are the ultimate outsiders.

I nodded. A man's world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you get raped or beat up? A man's world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money,and didn't have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.

She didn't like weepy films. She liked to
quote D. H. Lawrence : "Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself
of feelings you haven't really got." Hers were grim European films
- Antonioni, Bertolucci, Bergman - films where everybody
died or wished they had.

Here, here is my dark world. you carry it for a change. im out

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

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

Men ... No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.

The way Starr felt in church, that's how I felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated.

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. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.

As the earth presses a lump of prehistoric sung in heat and crushing weight deep under the ground. I hate him. Hate. I hate him. A jerk is forming inside my body. No it's not my heart.This it's harder, cold and clean. I wrap myself around this new jewel, cradle it within me

She was not used to being cruel, but he had taught her how.

He just wanted to stand close to her, touch her hair that was white as glacier milk ...

I took my mother's knife and played johnny johnny johnny on the playhouse floor. I was drunk, stabbed myself every few throws. I held my hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing my blood, the way there was when I saw the red gouges onmy face that people stared at and turned away. They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was.

You imagine you can see me, Mother? All you could ever see was your own face in a mirror."
"Who am I, Mother? I'm not you. That's why you wish I were dead. You can't shape me anymore.

Knew what it was to loose him. That specific being. that unique and miraculous collision of biology and history, spirit and matter.

How it was. How it was that the earth could open up under you and swallow you whole, close above you as if you never were. Like Persephone snatched by the god. The ground opened up and out he came, sweeping her into the black chariot. Then down they plunged, under the ground, into the darkness, and the earth closed over her head, and she was gone, as if she had never been.

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.

She had forgotten about this, the narcotic of the crowd. This is why you came to hear music. To stop being yourself, to let that thing that you supposedly were go, and just be part of a mob, synchronized by the heavy beat, mesmerized by a singer with big smeary red lips, her spooky chant.

All that was a dream, you couldn't hold on, you couldn't depend on frosted glass and Debussy.

Well, anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon's charcoal neck.

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

I walked along the side with the spray-painted trees, some in white like a starched chemical snowfall, others painted gold, pink, red, even black. The black tree, about three feet high, looked like it had been burnt. I wondered who would want a black tree, but I knew someone would. There was no limit to the ways in which people could be strange."

~ White Oleander

It sickens me to think of you
a prevalence of void
unholy
immovable
damned. gifts.
an overblown sense of his own importance.
I wish you were dead.

forget about you.
crow
florid with
fantasies
it's so awful
a perfect imitation
a liability to love
forget you
Ingrid Magnussen

quite alone
masturbating
rot
disappointment
grotesque

Your arms cradle
poisons
garbage
grenades

Loneliness
long-distance cries
forever
never
response.

take everything
feel me?
the human condition

Stop
plotting murder
penitence
Cultivate it

you
forbid
appeal
rage
important
I
cringe

fuck
you
insane
person
dissonant and querulous

my
gas tanks marked FULL

This ragged heart," she said, pulling at her kimono. "I should rip it out and bury it for compost.

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

These people picked you up and played with you and then left you lying in the rain

I write every day, including weekends. For writers, there are no weekends. It's just that your family is around, looking mournful, wondering when you're going to pay attention to them.

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.

Darkness coiled between what he wanted them to believe and the self he despised. It only made him more alone. How could you save someone when he didn't let you kno him? What a waste. The beauty he murdered in this place. He could never see what he had, only what he failed to achieve.

I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.

Doesn't anything matter to you?'
'Survival,' I said, but even that sounded untrue now. 'I guess.'
'That's not much.'
I painted a butterfly in Claire's room. Swallowtail. Another, cabbage white. 'I haven't gotten any farther than that.

This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives.

He could see the flames in my hair, he knew my lips would scorch him.

Nobody ever talked about what a struggle this all was. I could see why women used to die in childbirth. They didn't catch some kind of microbe, or even hemorrhage. They just gave up. They knew that if they didn't die, they'd be going through it again the next year, and the next. I couldn't understand how a woman might just stop trying, like a tired swimmer, let her head go under, the water fill her lungs. I slowly massaged Yvonne's neck, her shoulders, I wouldn't let her go under. She sucked ice through threadbare white terry. If my mother were here, she'd have made Melinda meek cough up the drugs, sure enough.
"Mamacita, ay," Yvonne wailed.
I didn't know why she would call her mother. She hated her mother. She hadn't seen her in six years, since the day she locked Yvonne and her brother and sisters in their apartment in Burbank to go out and party, and never came back. Yvonne said she let her boyfriends run a train on her when she was eleven. I didn't even know what that meant. Gang bang, she said. And still she called out, Mama.
It wasn't just Yvonne. All down the ward, they called for their mothers. ...
I held onto Yvonne's hands, and I imagined my mother, seventeen years ago, giving birth to me. Did she call for her mother?...I thought of her mother, the one picture I had, the little I knew. Karin Thorvald, who may or may not have been a distant relation of King Olaf of Norway, classical actress and drunk, who could recite Shakespeare by heart while

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.

(letters) They were like a kelp forest, they cast a weird green light, you could get lost there, become tangled and drown.
... still eyeing the letters like Portuguese man-of-wars floating on the innocent sea.

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.

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

Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. 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.

I wanted to be esteemed by the cognoscenti."
Josie heard her father in her head, See, I told you. She's laughin at you. "Sorry for being so ignorant, but is that a yes or a no?"
The dreamy look in Meredith's eyes dissolved, and the focused intelligence, self-conscious, returned. "By a special few. Those in the know. Cogno meaning recognition-cogitato, to think.

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

He had loved her, but he hated himself more.

I looked at my life and saw quite clearly that I was not surviving it in the turquoise house. I was letting my sails crust up with salt. I had to stop playing johnny johnny and concentrate on preparing for rain, preparing for rescue.

The elegance of a really good screenplay, I admire it. I can't do it.

My mother was an enthusiastic chef but wildly disorganized, and often preferred purchasing yet another jar of mace or chili powder rather than having to hunt down its last incarnation.

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. 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 could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn't seem to feel the chill.

don't sulk. you're acting just like a man.

I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds.

Echo, the death of a sound that had nowhere to go but to come back.

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.