Quotes from Janet Fitch

Many women get involved with a man that you pretty much know isn't suitable and you're kind of breaking your rules, but he's attractive in some unknown way. And then he doesn't even realize what a sacrifice you're making by being with him and he dumps you!

Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.

For she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame.

While out on the perimeter, women discovered the freedom of badlands. They were curiously free to invent, without having to liberate themselves from the forms and rewards of the cultural norm.

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.

When working on your own, you can make a choice and find out six months later that you made a bad choice. But when you work with people you trust, who understand your obsessions, you can take risks.

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

If sinners were so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?

When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.

How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it.

Whenever she thought she could not feel more alone, the universe peeled back another layer of darkness.

Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn't see possibilities. Then came despair.

You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.

The expression in her eyes was bitter as nightshade. '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 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.

They say drugs are not the answer, but really, what is the question?

That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she'd never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.

It's all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.

The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.

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. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment.

I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mothers. I wouldn't dare.

No matter where I was, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.

How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached myself to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention.

I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.

I watched her for a long time, memorizing her shoulders, her long-legged gait. This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives. That they didn't want their mothers to come running after them, begging their forgiveness, that they wouldn't have gone down on their knees and thanked god if they could stay.