Quotes from Janet Fitch

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

We get all the bad dreams, ese, she said, stroking my wet cheek with the palm of her hand. We got to leave some for somebody else.

Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.

This is Zen, she said. No flaw, no moment's hesitation. A window onto grace.

He just didn't want to see how damaged she was. As long as she didn't show him, that was all he asked for. A good show.

I could see the two of us in the round mirror on the wall, our long hair down, our blue eyes. Norsewomen. When I saw us like this, I could almost remember fishing in cold deep seas, the smell of cod, the charcoal of our fires, our felt boots and our strange alphabet, runes like sticks, a language like the ploughing of fields.

I looked at my life and saw quite clearly that I was not surviving it in the turquoise house. I was letting my sails crust up with salt. I had to stop playing johnny johnny and concentrate on preparing for rain, preparing for rescue.

I suppose they cannot imagine what a person might be called upon to endure, when a line of poetry can mean the difference between strength and despair.

Rena squinted at me, blowing a strand of her matte black hair out of her face, exasperated. 'You get good price for that. What you saving it for, tea with little Tsarevich Alexei? They shot him in 1918.' She took the dress out of the bag, shook it and hung it back up. 'Is fact.

Well, anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon's charcoal neck.

I'm a fish swimming by Ray. Catch me if you want me.

She wanted to know all about me, what I was like, who I was. I worried, there wasn't really much to tell. I had no preferences. I ate anything, wore anything, sat where you told me, slept where you said. I was infinitely adaptable.

God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.

I gazed up as if I hadn't heard, but what I was thinking was, tell me more about the pretty girls. I was embarrassed for wanting it, it was base, what did pretty matter? I had thought that so many times with my mother. A person didn't need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn't help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I'd take it.

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 ever again

It was a shrine. Josie hadn't thought to do that. She had no shrine, no candles. She only knew how to kill the thing she loved

Unvollendete, Meredith said. Unfinished

We tried not to be in the same room at the same time when Starr was home, we set the air on fire between us.

but for poetry one needs one's native tongue. The voice of the soul is not so easily translated.

My mother was not herself in the time of the Santa Anas. I was twelve years old and I was afraid for her.

I had been moving too fast. I had been too hungry to become a woman.

God is dead, haven't you heard, he died a hundred years ago, gave out from sheer lack of interest, decided to play golf instead.

Perfection was no protection. Disaster had a way of dropping by just when you least expected it.

She shouldn't be allowed to walk around. She might hurt someone.