Quotes from Janet Fitch

beautiful girls have certain advantages.

This was an artist's stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions.

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific—chair, eye, stone—but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

She never seemed more complete, more sure of herself. Not trying to please anyone anymore. Page 292

So often when I was with her, she was unreachable. Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.

That was the frightening part about believing in things. You could wake up one day and it could all be gone.

Don't you let them forget about you," she said. But this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe.

How did I get so lost? Mother

A magician came to entertain us, and I was mesmerized by his beautiful hands, his fluid, round gestures. I couldn't stop watching his hands. They were better than any of his tricks. He pulled a bouquet of paper flowers out of the air and gave them to me with a courtly bow, and I thought love was like that, pulled out of the air, something bright and unlikely.

She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress. "What

I was bad, I had done bad things, I had hurt people, and the worst of it was, I didn't want to stop. Blue

What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of for Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale boulevard, making their moves with a great deck missing a written and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces.

We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water. I

I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here.

Do go on," I said, and it sounded just like Mother. It just came out.

She could steal my soul. She was already doing it. But who else did I have, what other beauty was there?

Love's an illusion. It's a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt.

She should have realized I was a bad luck person, she should never have thought I was someone to count on.

The Romans were right. One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.

It made me hopefully, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.

It felt so good to be high. I felt the lid of the pencil-gray sky lift and I could breathe, I didn't dread the rest of the afternoon now.

I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other. One

I liked the shifting colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next. They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe watched on a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?

I lay my Webster's on the scrubbed table in the lantern light, to learn that flotsam is the debris left from shipwreck, while jetsam is merchandise thrown overboard from a ship in crisis to lighten the load.