Top 277 Quotes & Sayings by Janet Fitch - Page 5

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

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

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

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

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

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.

I'm always looking for something new and interesting to say. And it can't be something I'm directly experiencing.

You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.

Inside every human being, there is unlimited time and space.

I think we're starved for a life of the senses. We're in the garage, we're in the car, we drive to work, we're in a windowless cubicle that's gray and beige. In a way, it's funny that we consider ourselves an advanced culture, because people who live in so-called primitive environments still enjoy the richness of the smells, colors, and sounds of our world. We all crave that.

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

A womans mistakes are different from a girls

...The men eyed her with the automatic mix of curiosity, lust, and aesthetic judgment they always gave young women, subject to object, the way you'd stare at an animal. She pretended not to notice. To remind them she was a person was too much effort. Objects bore no guilt.

How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While 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.

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

Once you get below the floor of our personal identities, we're all connected. Perhaps that's why we can move into others' lives.

And 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 seperate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.

I usually start with something that has some energy, like a compressed character or a situation that's wound up like a spring. Then all I have to do is let it go, let its energy carry the story. And that may not turn out to be the beginning of the book.

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

When I start writing, my unconscious, my conflicts, my thoughts all start to come up. So for me, writing is an exploration. I never know how my stories will end.

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.

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.

When I read, I want to be fully transported to another place. I want to feel things, smell things.

I'm always gratified when I check something I've made up and discover that I've gotten it right. How can we imagine something that turns out to be true? How can we know things we couldn't possibly know? It makes me wonder about the existence of a collective unconscious.

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.

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.

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

I was always mortified.Didn't they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?

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

I'm incredibly restless. I read a lot of poetry. I also find myself reading the first 20 pages of everything, looking for something. And you know what? I'm usually looking for the book I'm writing. And it's not out there!

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.

If this was a sandalwood pyre she would have thrown herself in and this paper she'd become would have caught fire and she and him could sail away like two birds.

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.

history only existed in the human mind, subject to endless revision. 'each man kills the thing he loves'-Oscar Wilde. You kill it before it kills you, but he was wrong. you killed it by accident. thinking you were doing something else. shattering, when all you wanted to do was keep it safe.

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

A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it

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