Quotes from Janet Fitch

Meredith's father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself.

I learned, whatever you hung from my earlobes or out on my back, I was insoluble, like same in water. Stir me up, I always rest on the bottom

She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot.

Don't tell me how you hate your new foster home. If they're not beating you, consider yourself lucky.

Abdication, a great brass bell, solemn, resonant, deafening.

Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you.

Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It

Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately?

It was one thing to hope, but you had to take care of yourself in the present, or you wouldn't survive.

All this time, masquerading as a nice, well-bred girl when I was a stream in flood, a length of fire, the fall of a hawk.

snakes rarely bite above the ankles

the gamelan created in the listener a brain wave beyond all alphas and betas and thetas, a brain wave that paralyzed the normal channels of thought and forced new ones to grow outside them, in the untouched regions of the mind, like parallel blood vessels that form to accommodate a damaged heart.

I lay on my mattress on the screen porch and waited for him to leave, watching the blue of the evening turn velvet, indigo lingering like an unspoken hope, while my mother and the blond man murmured on the other side of the screens. Incense perfumed the air, a special kind she bought in Little Tokyo, without any sweetness, expensive.

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. We

I was torn and stitched, I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.

It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality, your touch, pressure, the authority of your movement.

Loneliness was the human condition, I had to get used to it.

her magenta lips a wolf's stained smile.

anyway. People didn't fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

Father turned on me as if blackbirds had flown out of my mouth.

She's never where she is," I said. "She's only inside her head.

People want a little magic. Sex is its theater. There are sliding panels and trapdoors.

My freckles felt like they would burst into flame.