Quotes from Janet Fitch

Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds.

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. A

When I'd been with Kolya, I'd been the moon, and he was the sun: he could give me his warmth or withhold it, pursue me or forget me.

I felt helpless to prevent her life from taking its likely direction. Could a person save another person?

But I knew one more thing. That people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger. They

You ask me about regret? 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, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the end itself? I've given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine.

Reverend Thomas said that in hell, the sinners were indifferent to the suffering of others, it was part of damnation. I hadn't understood that until now. She

High-voltage wires stretched between steel towers like giants holding jump ropes into the distance.

Per atrankas jai kartodavo, kad tai pernelyg klasikinis stilius. Tai nereišk?, kad per senas. Tai reišk? - per gražus laikams, kai visa, kas trunka ilgiau kaip šešis m?nesius, beviltiškai pasensta.

Only peons made excuses for themselves, she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.

Žinai, aukš?io baim? yra sav?s baim? - niekad nežinai, kada gali nušokti žemyn.

Baltas katinas nusliuog? nuo man?s lyg b?gantis pienas.

Men," she said. "No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy." I

I knew one more thing. That people who denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger. They were blind sleepwalkers on tightropes, fingers scoring thin air.

It made me feel dizzy, like I wanted to grab hold of something heavy and hang on. This was the life I was going to be living, everyone separated from everyone else, hanging on for a moment, only to be washed away. I could grow up and drift away too. My mother might never know where I was, and in a few years, if someone asked her about me, she might shrug like this and say, "Haven't seen her in two, three years.

Are you gay?' Paul Trout asked me. I shrugged. Maybe that would be better. I thought back to how I felt when Olivia danced with me, and the time Claire kissed me on the lips. I didn't know. People just wanted to be loved. That was the things 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.

This ragged heart, she said, pulling at her kimono. I should rip it out and use it for compost.

And suddenly I felt panic. I'd made a mistake, like when I'd played chess with Ray and knew a second too late I'd made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn't afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn't want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn't need to see it, the hideous eyelets albino creature that lived underneath.

As the earth presses a lump of prehistoric sung in heat and crushing weight deep under the ground. I hate him. Hate. I hate him. A jerk is forming inside my body. No it's not my heart.This it's harder, cold and clean. I wrap myself around this new jewel, cradle it within me

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

Like Berlin, I was layered with guilt and destruction. I had caused grief as well as suffering it. I could never honestly point a finger without it turning around in mid-accusation. Olivia

I was graduating in two months, but I wasn't to Pitzer, that was for sure. I was the old child, the past that had to burned away, so my mother, the phoenix, could emerge once again, a golden bird rising from the ash.

Doesn't anything matter to you?' 'Survival,' I said, but even that sounded untrue now. 'I guess.' 'That's not much.' I painted a butterfly in Claire's room. Swallowtail. Another, cabbage white. 'I haven't gotten any farther than that.

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness.