Quotes from Janet Fitch

and window, put the plastic Frosty the Snowman on the blacktop, wired up the

Loneliness ia a human condition

Her violence. Claire, what did you know about violence? My mother's strength? Well she wasn't strong enough to avoid being the background of my art. Just the background. Her words just my canvas.

Loneliness is the human condition, get used to it.

What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live or damn it for allowing the rest? Have you heard of the Stockholm Syndrome? Hostages begin taking the side of their captors, in their gratitude not to have been killed outright. Let us not thank some hypothetical God. Instead, rest and gain strength for the new campaign... [p. 105].

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 ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you can begin to imagine.

The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw.

I was the center of my own universe, it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around me, and I liked the way he looked at me.

It wasn't like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn't learned yet, there was not such thing as an empty canvas.

And I realized as walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.

I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of water, the chink of dogs' leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother's dip-pen, the smell of the tree, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I

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.

Time has taken on an utterly different quality for me. What difference does a year make? In a perverse way, I pity the women who are still a part of time, trapped by it, how many months, how many days. I have been cut free, I move among centuries.

I imagined myself a professor's daughter, riding a bike to my classes. I could wear a camel's hair coat at last, have a roommate, play intramural volleyball, all paid for in advance.

Now I wished she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.

They congratulated themselves and went back out to their sodas and Chex mix, leaving me in front of the mirror, a toddler's fussed-over Barbie abandoned in the sandbox. I blinked back my tears and forced myself to look in the mirror. Looking

Never let a man stay the night," she told me. "Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.

But they weren't small children, they were women, they were admiring someone they didn't know the first thing about. Look at the hag Truth for once, college girl.

Mother prescribing her books like medicines. A good dose of Whitman would set me straight, like castor oil. But at least she was thinking of me.

You always said I knew nothing, but that was the place to begin. I would never claim to know what women in prison dreamed about, or the rights of beauty, or what the night's magic held. If I thought for a second I did, I'd never have the chance to find out, to see it whole, to watch it emerge and reveal itself. I don't have to put my face on every cloud, be the protagonist of every random event.

She closed the magazine and stared at the girl on the cover, a girl who had never been pregnant, never had a social worker or a filling. Yvonne stroked the water-wavy cover. I could tell, she wanted to know what that girl knew, feel how she felt, to be so beautiful, wanted, confident. Like people touching the statue of a saint.

Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners? But

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

It scared me when she said perfect. Perfect was always too much to ask.