Fitch Quotes

Life is a game of whist. From unseen sources The cards are shuffled, and the hands are dealt. I do not like the way the cards are shuffled, But yet I like the game and want to play. ~ Eugene Fitch Ware

I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic. ~ Janet Fitch

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Janet Fitch

The problem with trying to be relevant is it makes us copy what culture is already doing. To be relevant, you have to copy what is cool. So we put our mouths on the tailpipe of secular culture in hopes we can recycle some of it and use it for ourselves. The problem with this is that it automatically puts us ten to fifteen years behind culture because rather than setting the precedent, we are copying their systems. This is where we get a huge section of Christian apparel and coffee mugs that simply copy secular logos. My favorite is the shirt with the words "Holy Spirit" printed in the same font and logo as Sprite. Or the one with "A bread crumb and a fish" instead of Abercrombie and Fitch. We call it redeeming, but it's actually stealing. Making bad art is bad in and of itself, but if we are Christians, this takes on a whole other level of weight. Because we are called to mirror and reflect God, everything we do should give people a proper picture of who he is. ~ Jefferson Bethke

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

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. ~ Janet Fitch

purification in fire. public cremation ~ Janet Fitch

Bad choices almost always result from making a choice out of fear. ~ Jon Fitch

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

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. ~ Janet Fitch

How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care. ~ Janet Fitch

That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He'd have had to change his whole philosophy. The ~ Janet Fitch

Other boys were happy enough to enjoy the show, they just wanted to be entertained in the body's shadow theater. ~ Janet Fitch

At any one time there is a natural tendency among physicists to believe that we already know the essential ingredients of a comprehensive theory . But each time a new frontier of observation is broached we inevitably discover new phenomena which force us to modify substantially our previous conceptions. I believe this process to be unending, that the delights and challenges of unexpected discovery will continue always. ~ Val Logsdon Fitch

You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know. ~ Janet Fitch

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 ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

Isn't it funny.I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than i ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you. ~ Janet Fitch

Try walking the halls of Congress. It's Abercrombie & Fitch meets the Hair Club for Men. Lots of really photogenic young people kissing up to lots of insufferable blowhards. Separated by one or two generations, most of these players have only one real thing in common: They have never been weaned from the public teat. The closest they've ever come to meeting a payroll is when they come together to spend everyone else's payroll taxes. ~ Michelle Malkin

God is at work in all the places we already inhabit. He is bigger than the arena of our own immediate church programs and ideas about evangelism. He is a prodigal God recklessly working in people and situations of all types. If we truly believe God is at work in the world, we must take the time to pay attention, listen, and discern what God is doing in the lives of those around us. ~ David E. Fitch

The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light. ~ Janet Fitch

Let me tell you a few things about regret ... There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox. ~ Janet Fitch

You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud. ~ Janet Fitch

Love humiliates you, hatred cradles you. ~ Janet Fitch

her magenta lips a wolf's stained smile. ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad. ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this lousy world. ~ Janet Fitch

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

In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn't learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas. ~ Janet Fitch

People want a little magic. Sex is its theater. There are sliding panels and trapdoors. ~ Janet Fitch

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

Fitch is on his way. He's coming after he blows up some wizards. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

I've always been concerned with what happens to children in our society when there's nobody left to take care of them. ~ Janet Fitch

Ours is an age where ethics has become obsolete. It is superseded by science, deleted by philosophy and dismissed as emotive by psychology. It is drowned in compassion, evaporates into aesthetics and retreats before relativism. The usual moral distinctions between good and bad are simply drowned in a maudlin emotion in which we feel more sympathy for the murderer than for the murdered, for the adulterer than for the betrayed, and in which we have actually begun to believe that the real guilty party, the one who somehow caused it all, is the victim, and not the perpetrator of the crime. ~ Robert Fitch

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

He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn't know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked. ~ Janet Fitch

The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. 'You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine. ~ Janet Fitch

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

It scared me when she said perfect. Perfect was always too much to ask. ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

I think that Oprah's on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment. ~ Janet Fitch

Mainly, it was the sense of order, vision retained over time, that brought me to my knees. ~ Janet Fitch

If I were a poet, that's what I'd write about. People who worked in the middle of the night. Men who loaded trains, emergency room nurses with their gentle hands. Night clerks in hotels, cabdrivers on graveyard, waitresses in all-night coffee shops. They knew the world, how precious it was when a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical question, "How's it going, how's the kids?" They knew how long the night was. They knew the sound life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers lived without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the airport for one last fare. ~ Janet Fitch

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

A fish has no concept of water. ~ Janet Fitch

The phoenix must burn to emerge. ~ Janet Fitch

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They're all parts of yourself. ~ Janet Fitch

She shouldn't be allowed to walk around. She might hurt someone. ~ Janet Fitch

It's your flaws, not your strengths, that go down in the depths of your books. You're exposed, like dreaming you're naked in a public building. ~ Janet Fitch

I'd seen a couple of Claire's movies now. She was transparent,
heartbreaking. I would be afraid to be so vulnerable. I'd spent the
last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I
wouldn't drip with blood every time I brushed up against something.
She was naked, she peeled herself daily. ~ Janet Fitch

I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds.
~ Janet Fitch

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

Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It breathes life into the subject. ~ Noel Riley Fitch

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

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. ~ Janet Fitch

You've been everywhere, haven't you." I had, but it hadn't done me much good. ~ Janet Fitch

She joked about her fears, but it was the kind of joke where you knew people thought it was ridiculous, and you pretended you thought so too, but underneath you were completely serious. ~ Janet Fitch

I kept sending out stories and getting rejected. ~ Janet Fitch

And in one drawer, twenty-seven names for tears. Heartdew. Griefhoney. Sadwater. Die Tranen. Eau de douleur. Los rios del corazon. ~ Janet Fitch

Fans want heroes. They're bored. They want a hero and want to follow that guy. ~ Jon Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human. ~ Janet Fitch

Quality doesn't improve by sitting on things. ~ Val Logsdon Fitch

I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not. I never get inspired unless I'm already writing. ~ Janet Fitch

No town can hope prosperity and trade, unless the press shall vigorously aid. ~ Eugene Fitch Ware

What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me. ~ Janet Fitch

That was the frightening part about believing in things. You could wake up one day and it could all be gone. ~ Janet Fitch

I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated. ~ Janet Fitch

Even though he lived on the beach in college, he didn't have a tan. Now that's a serious player! ~ Bill Fitch

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 ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

I always enjoyed working out and pushing myself physically and mentally as much as I possibly could. ~ Jon Fitch

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

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. ~ Janet Fitch

Michael used to draw self-portraits with nightmares hidden in his curls. ~ Janet Fitch

I'm very good at what I do and there's not too many people in the world that have an answer for what I can do. ~ Jon Fitch

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

It's such a liability to love another person. ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

They explained about the epidurals and drugs, but no one there was going to have drugs. They all wanted the natural experience. It all seemed wrapped in plastic, unreal, like stewardesses on planes demonstrating the seat belts and the patterns for orderly disembarkatation in case of a crash at sea, the people taking a glance at the cards in the seat pocket in front of them. Sure, they thought, no problem. A peek at the nearest exit and then they were ready for in-flight service, peanuts and a movie. ~ Janet Fitch

But mainly I learned, in approaching the measurement of new phenomena, not just to consider using existing apparatus but to allow the mind to wander freely and invent new ways of doing the job . ~ Val Logsdon Fitch

Four was difficult and misunderstood, a genius before its time, it belonged to the planet of unexpected disaster. ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

He was obsessed with obituaries. She'd never read them before, he couldn't believe it, to him it was like someone who'd never read the funnies...Michael always wanted to know what they died of- accidental gunshot wounds, overdose, cancer. 'Was it suicide?' That's what he really wanted to know. ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch

Dostoevsky was my literary idol for a long time. ~ Janet Fitch

I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear aroung my neck. I wish a thousand-year sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like the sleep over the castle of Sleeping Beauty. ~ Janet Fitch

They can't touch us. We're the Vikings. We go into battle without armor for the flush and the blood of it. ~ Janet Fitch

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. ~ Janet Fitch