Quotes from Janet Fitch

Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched....

What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?

She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I'm so lonely, so desperate. I'll give you whatever you want.

She's never where she is,' I said. 'She's only inside her head.

The damned could be saved...anytime. But they refused to give up their sins. Though they suffered endlessly, they would not give them up, even for salvation, perfect divine love. I hadn't understood at the time. If sinners were unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life.

That kind of tenderness couldn't be permitted to last. You only got a taste, enough to know what perfection meant, and then you paid for it the rest of your life. Like the guy chained to a rock, who stole fire. The gods made an eagle eat his liver for all eternity. You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal.

I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.

A fish has no concept of water.

The stupid things you say in the rain, that can't ever be washed away.

I wanted to hear what she was saying. I wanted to smell that burnt midnight again, I wanted to feel that wind. It was a secret wanting, like a song I couldn't stop humming, or loving someone I could never have. No matter where I went, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.

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

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.

Love is a check, that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.

You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal.

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

I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.

without my wounds, who was i? my scars were my face, my past was my life.

We received our colouring from the Norsemen, hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees. We are the ones who sacked Rome. Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. Don't forget who you are.

Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.

He reminded me of someone who put your fingers in the door and smiled and talked to you while he smashed them.

I liked it when my mother tried to teach me things, when she paid attention. 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.

I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.

echo, the death of a sound that had nowhere to go but to come back.

Music. A flower in a vase on the tray. A January rose, it wouldn't last long, all big and full-blown like that. He loved things like this, fragile, that wouldn't last. She touched its silver-mauve petals, a hundred layers like an old-fashioned petticoat. The Japanese would say that's their elegance, the brevity of their beauty.