Quotes from Janet Fitch

My father, that silhouette, a form comprised of all I did not know, a shape filled with rain. Whenever I asked, she'd say, 'You had no father. I'm your father. You sprang full-blown from my forehead, like Athena.

You've been everywhere, haven't you." I had, but it hadn't done me much good.

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

We parked in back and walked down the stairs with their polished brass railings, past the old-fashioned kitchen. We could see the chefs cooking. It smelled like stew, or meat loaf, the way time should smell, solid and nourishing.

They say time heals all wounds but they're lying

He'd loved her, he had. And he knew she loved him, he knew it! But it wasn't enough. She couldn't have imagined such a thing was possible. Love wasn't enough

I was the center of my own universe it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around new, and I liked the way he looked at me l. Who had ever looked at me, who had ever noticed me? If this was evil, let God change my mind.

Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over Echo Park, stopping to visit the lotus. They weren't going to be like everyone else, they were Blaise and Jeanne, eating dreams and drinking blue sky.

I felt just the way Billie Holiday sounded, like I'd cried all I could and it wasn't enough.

That beautiful girl, she was a universe, bearer of these words that rang like gongs, that tumbled like flutes made of human bones.

Claire made me think it was worth trying. Of course you took the honors classes. Of course you wore your jewelry. Of course you signed up for art classes at the museum. Of course. In

At times like this I surprise myself, how I've managed to create something of a life on this foggy shore out of the broken pieces of myself, scavenged from the sea like flotsam. Or is it jetsam…it irks me not to know the difference.

What did it mean, that the two people she loved best in the world hated each other? It was the sides of herself, irreconcilable.

I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her.

She usually loved this band, but today their cheerfulness made her want to crash the car.

Death now or death later, that was the real question.

A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter.

She had forgotten about this, the narcotic of the crowd. This is why you came to hear music. To stop being yourself, to let that thing that you supposedly were go, and just be part of a mob, synchronized by the heavy beat, mesmerized by a singer with big smeary red lips, her spooky chant.

Marvel hates her because she's pretty and doesn't have any kids to worry about.

This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else, hanging on for a moment, only to be washed away. I could grow up and drift away too.

Things touched Claire. Maybe too much, but at least they touched her. She couldn't twist things around in her mind, make the ends come out right.

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.

Mainly, it was the sense of order, vision retained over time, that brought me to my knees.

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. It wasn't like I didn't know where all this remembering got you, all that hunger for beauty and astonishing cruelty and ever-present loss.