Best 238 quotes of Janet Fitch on MyQuotes

A book's flaws make it less predictable.

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.

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

A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. But I didn't want to start. I knew how it would play. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.

A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you've already written. Often the story you're looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.

A fish has no concept of water.

After all the fears, the warnings, after all, a woman's mistakes are different from a girl's. They are written by fire on stone. They are a trait and not an error.

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

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

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.

A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it

Appealing to the five senses is the feature that will always set writing apart from the visual media. A good writer will tell us what the world smells like, what the textures are, what the sounds are, what the light looks like, what the weather is.

Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew in huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren't worth as much. It was the emerald that didn't break that was the really valuable thing.

As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.

As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I've waited all my life for the computer.

At every moment, each instrument knew what to play. Its little bit. But none could see the whole thing like this, all at once, only its own part. Just like life. Each person was like a line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score.

at least if you were ignorant you could do wat you wanted. you had no idea wat had been acheived in the past. you were free instead of chewed at by bleeding impotence, dissolved away like a pearl in acid

Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.

Beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.

Being in the library is so addictive for me that I really have to exercise self-control so I can get some writing done at home.

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

But that was the thing about zero. Its weakness. Even if zero had taken over the entire universe, the biggest fascist of all, one tiny gesture could deny it. One footprint, one atom. You didn't have to be a genius. You didn't even have to know that was what you were doing. You made a mark. You changed something. It said, "A human being passed here." And changed zero to one.

Darkness coiled between what he wanted them to believe and the self he despised. It only made him more alone. How could you save someone when he didn't let you kno him? What a waste. The beauty he murdered in this place. He could never see what he had, only what he failed to achieve.

Dawn tinted the darkness like water ink.

Death like a lover, caressing him, promising him peace, running its fingers through his hair, its tongue in his ear. She put her own two fingers in her mouth. Im so sorry. And pulled the trigger

Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Lonliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best thing you can do it know yourself... know what you want.

Don't hoard the past. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

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

Find someone who will tremble for your touch, someone whose fingers are a poem.

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

Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face on a November day in the rain.

He hated crowds, never liked punk. He couldn't handle the nakedness of the rage -his own so sophisticated and finely tuned. He could never see the similarity between himself and Donnie Draino screaming into a mic.

here, here is my dark world. you carry it for a change. im out

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

Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins.

her scruffy innoscense to impregnate with his dreams. reason was seductive, it gave the appearance of truth

history only existed in the human mind, subject to endless revision. 'each man kills the thing he loves'-Oscar Wilde. You kill it before it kills you, but he was wrong. you killed it by accident. thinking you were doing something else. shattering, when all you wanted to do was keep it safe.

His voice was cloves and nightingales, it took us to spice markets in the Celebs, we drifted with him on a houseboat beyond the Coral Sea. We were like cobras following a reed flute.

How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?

How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.

How many people ask you to come share their life?

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.

How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.

I almost said, you're not broken, you're just going through something. But i couldn't. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn't worked.

I could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn't seem to feel the chill.

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

I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do 'cause then at least I would've done what I wanted to do in life. What's that worth?

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

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

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