Quotes from Janet Fitch

You want car?' Rena said. 'Artist college? You think I don't know? How you think you pay? So this dress. Pretty dress. Someone gave. But money is . . .' She stopped, struggling to find the words, what money was. Finally, she threw her hands up. 'Money. You want remember, so just remember.

Remember...we don't see objects, we see light. [...] Light can do anything water can do--flow, wash, trickle. It can do anything an artist can do--paint, burnish, carve. Candlelight falls, licks a face. There is always light in a room.

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

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

I felt my guilt like a brand.

Nobody knew anyone else's private world. In the end, they were all alone as inmates on death row, side by side. Sometimes you could get a look at one another with a little pocket mirror, cell to cell, but that was all.

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

She was sorry to have hurt her, but she wanted them all to leave her alone, let her keep it together. Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold.

His voice was cloves and nightingales.

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

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.

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?

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

You must find... 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.

Now was too big, like a giant dark planet coming up over the horizon. she wanted then. That's what he'd seen that day, a brightness with darkness all around, watching her, as if she were glamorous, as if she were a rare and mysterious creature.

He had loved her, but he hated himself more.

In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside?

I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of the water, the chink of the dogs' leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother's dip-pen, the smell of the trees, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I wished a sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like sleep over the castle of sleeping beauty.

Memory is the fourth landscape.

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.

I felt like an Israeli girl soldier, in shorts and the hot wind, sighting down the barrel of the rifle, holding the .38 with both hands. It was a strange feeling, him looking at me as I aimed. I found I couldn't quite lose myself in the target. His eyes split my attention between the C in Coke and my awareness of him watching me. And I thought, this was what it was like to be beautiful.

Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.

This was the wonderful thing about strangers. They were big blank pieces of paper, you could draw whatever you liked on their impressionable surfaces.

His trips home were handholds for her, so she could swing from one square on the calendar to the next. When he said he was going to come home and didn't, she swung forward and grasped thin air, fell.