Quotes from Janet Fitch

On the cover that leaned against the dirty couch, John and Yoko pressed together for a kiss they would never finish. People were always trashing Yoko Ono, blaming her for breaking up the Beatles, but Josie knew they were just jealous that John preferred Yoko to some bloated megaband. Nobody ever loved a lover. Because love was a private party, and nobody got on the guest list.

What isn't there is as important as what is, Phil always said.

The phoenix must burn to emerge

You talk to the night I was her first, you say. And you'll say You knew me once When my dress was made of autumn leaves And my hair a smoldering fire As you smoke your cigar Sip whisky with its peaty smoke. Memory fades, but never that. A kiss among furs, Another kind of fire.

Especially the first one I thought it explained their relationship. At several points at the beginning of the story I wondered how Fitch was going to make the story last about a dead boyfriend. I think parts like that and more further into the story explained how Josie felt and why she was devastated. The one about girls knowing the destructive power of truth is spot on. hehe

So much for those gleanings from novels, from paintings, as if love were a matter of posing in picturesque dishabille. No. You went into it as a tiger encountering another tiger. You went into it like a person jumping off a bridge.

Just like life. Each person was like one line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score.

The Fool, the Zero card, dressed in motley, dazzled face to the sky, foot about to come off the cliff. Pierrot. It wasn't Michael at all. It was her. You fool...And which one was he? The Magician? She'd thought he was. She'd thought he had it all lined up. The world spinning on his little finger. Or else the Hermit with his lantern, looking for the true world. But no, here he was. The twelfth card. The Hanged Man. Lashed upside down to his cross tree. Unable to go backward or forward

I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception.

But she was sure old Henry'd showed up with the other granola-heads, lit incense and rang finger cymbals and blew some pot, no doubt, in John's memory. Om rama rama. Did John Lennon really want all that? Was that what he was about? From what she'd heard, the guy'd had some wit and brains - did he really want to be the dead guy of the hour, like a melting centerpiece?

Shot by a desperate fan. On the news, fans were always desperate. Got his signature and then shot him down. The saddest thing about it was that she wasn't more shocked. To Josie, it just seemed part of the way things were heading, Ronald Reagan, greedheads running everything. Killing John Lennon seemed like just mopping up. Thirty thousand people missing in El Salvador, those nuns, and everybody in America was worried about who shot JR.

It was true, Jeremy took advantage. And she let him. It was his film, and she really didn't care. It was just a body, like a rented suit. Michael had tried to make her feel differently about herself, that it wasn't just for use by others, it was hers, she belonged to herself, she had to occupy herself.

She kept thinking about it as Jeremy talked about his Concept for the movie, the locations, some house off Sunset Plaza he pronounced total Sixties, it'll blow your mind. She imagined walking into the house and blowing her head off.

And it occurred to Josie how tortured Michael must have been by the way his mother's gift just flowed out of her, so clear and certain and unobstructed, like a spring. How painful it must have been for him to watch this. Michael had that genius, maybe even more than Meredith, but couldn't let it out like that. Just pour it out. And no matter how good he was, even if he was the one picked out of a whole show, he could never feel it. He could do everything except find a way to satisfaction.

Michael, in a motel in Twentynine Palms, a gun in his hands. Not at Meredith's, painting in an explosion of new creation. Not over on Sunset, digging through the record bins, or at Launderland separating the darks and lights. Not at the Chinese market, looking at the fish with their still-bright eyes. Not at the Vista watching an old movie. Not sketching down at Echo Park. He was in a motel room in Twentynine Palms, putting a bullet in his brain.

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.

I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.

My thoughts about God are vague and abstract. My connection with the energy of the universe is shaky.

It's your flaws, not your strengths, that go down in the depths of your books. You're exposed, like dreaming you're naked in a public building.

A cliche is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.

I think that Oprah's on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment.

Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.