Quotes from Janet Fitch

His guitar bore his longing up into the darkness like sparks, a music profound in its objectless desire, beautiful beyond solace or solution

She cut a small piece of the gravalax and put it on a piece of black bread, daintily spooned a bit of dill sauce onto it, and ate it like it was the last piece of food in the world. I tried to imitate her, eating so slowly, tasting the raw pink fish and the coarse, sour bread, salt and sugar around the rind, flavors and scents like colors on a palette, like the tones in music.

Worth. He made you feel worthwhile. That was his gift.

Don't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.

There was no God there was only what you wanted.

This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives.

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.

Death disapearance was what you didnt talk about. like a sewer running under the street, the shit was down there, out of sight, but you could smell it, it didnt go away, it didnt vanish

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.

Her body felt like it'd been beaten with a hose. This must be what it felt like to get old. It wasn't that your body fell apart from living so long. It was that you had to take so many stompings from life that you'd be happy when the time came to close your eyes and never open them again.

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.

The moon rose, squatting in the strained blue.

The secret is -- a magician doesn't buy magic. Admire the skill of a magician, but never fall under his spell. She rose and collected our glasses. And I thought of how Barry seduced my mother, his smoked mirrors and hidden trained doves. She never chose him, not really, but she gave him everything. She would always be his, even if he was dead. He had shaped her destiny.

Well, she wasn't strong enough to avoid being the background of my art. Just the background. Her words just my canvas.

I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children, between friends, family, things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost, more easily than anyone could imagine.

I felt on the verge of something, a mystery that surrounded me like gauze, something I was beginning to unwind.

Her voice made me drunk, deep and sun-warmed, a hint of a foreign accent, Swedish singsong a generation removed.

He could see the flames in my hair, he knew my lips would scorch him.

Maybe that was the only real truth about the world, that there was no answer, that wisdom and experience were no better than a flat-out roll of the dice.

She didn't like weepy films. She liked to quote D. H. Lawrence : Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got. Hers were grim European films — Antonioni, Bertolucci, Bergman — films where everybody died or wished they had.

What's real is always worth it,' she explained to me. 'Look how it's made.' She showed me the shoulders, the way they were knit together with a separate yoke instead of a seam. 'You'll wear it your whole life.

What was a weed, anyway. A plant nobody planted? A seed escaped from a traveler's coat, something that didn't belong? Was it something that grew better than what should have been there? Wasn't it just a word, weed, trailing its judgments. Useless, without value. Unwanted.

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.

The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.