Quotes from Janet Fitch

She wanted to wake up like Dorothy and see Michael's face peering over the side of the bed, laughing. WHY, YOU JUST HIT YOUR HEAD. But it was not a dream and there was no Kansas and he was never coming back.

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

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.

I almost said, you're not broken, you're just going through something. But I couldn't. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn't worked.

Who are you? the band sang. I tried to remember but I really couldn't say.

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.

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

A cliche is everything you've ever heard of.

I could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn't seem to feel the chill.

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.

There is no God, there is only what you want.

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.

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?

Always learn poems by heart,' she said. '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.

If I were a poet, that's what I'd write about. People who worked in the middle of the night. 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 live without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the airport for one last fare.

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.

She was my life raft, my turtle.

Lovers who kill each other will blame it on the wind.

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

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

Who can judge another man's suffering?

I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

their eager eyes unlocking the secrets of the human form. who could just look at it as it is, without prettying it up or emphasizing its awfulness

I would rather live out on the desert alone, like an old prospector. All I needed was a small water source. What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.