Quotes from Janet Fitch

love is temperamental. tiring. it makes demands. love uses you. changes its mind.

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

I hadn't understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy,why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life.

To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind's destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race. Three cheers for Eve.

I couldn't stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was. 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 mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain.

We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.

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

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.

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

Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after

We have no home, she told me. I am your home.

Never apologize, never explain.

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

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

Love. I would ban the word from the vocabulary. Such imprecision. Love, which love, what love? Sentiment, fantasy, longing, lust? Obsession, devouring need? Perhaps the only love that is accurate without qualification is the love of a very young child. Afterward, she too becomes a person, and thus compromised.

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.

For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body against the uncanny blue sky.

purification in fire. public cremation

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.

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. It's so soothing. I feel infinitely better now.

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

If only we could be back there right now, a soft rain falling, in the cabin, the woodstove.

People losing each other, their hands slipping loose in a crowd.

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.