Quotes from Janet Fitch

It's the difference between a true artist and everybody else. Claire sighed. They can remake the world.

Solo perchè un poeta dice qualcosa non significa che sia vero, ma solo che suona bene.

On the anvil of August, the city lay paralyzed, stunned into stupidity by the heat.

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.

I hate people," he said, wiping the urchin's face with the rag. "Animals are more noble. Look at this boy. He's poor and desperate, but can they see it? Can they pity him? No. They should embrace him. They should save their kicks and blows for the bastards who keep them so poor, who set them on each other like dogs.

What if he…" But I didn't want to say die…dying was a matter for professionals, not poets.

A phrase that would have sent Michael into ecstasies of loathing. Sort of Einstein meets Jayne Mansfield . . . Hitler meets Roy Rogers.

It was all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.

My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.

Michael used to draw self-portraits with nightmares hidden in his curls.

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

In stages, that's how. First you let go of the things you loved.

I wanted to be esteemed by the cognoscenti. Josie heard her father in her head, See, I told you. She's laughin at you. Sorry for being so ignorant, but is that a yes or a no? The dreamy look in Meredith's eyes dissolved, and the focused intelligence, self-conscious, returned. By a special few. Those in the know. Cogno meaning recognition-cogitato, to think.

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.

Knew what it was to loose him. That specific being. that unique and miraculous collision of biology and history, spirit and matter.

You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know.

So now I was supposed to feel pity for you and those other women who'd lost their own children during a holdup, a murder, a fiesta of greed? Save your poet's sympathy and find some better believer. Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good.

I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It frightened me for Claire to bare her needs so openly. If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away. I didn't need to put mirrors on the roof to know that.

There was power in me now, where there had been none.

Those who love poetry, even my unreadable foreign brand, are a tender breed.

Just a beginner, but he learned so fast. Everything came so damn easy to him. Not true. The hard things cam easy. But the easy things he found impossibly hard.

Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time. We

She wished Michael had had a grandfather like this guy Morty, someone to tell him, It's a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you're worth. Instead of one who showed him how to die.

She yearned to call him, but hated the sound of the phone ringing, ringing, knowing that he might be standing right there, not picking up, knowing it was her.