Quotes by Janet Fitch

“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 ur...”

“My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.”

“I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of the water, the chink of the dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the tree...”

“We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.”

“Now it seemed unbelievable, the innocence of a girl in a fairy tale.”

“Who are you? the band sang. I tried to remember but I really couldn't say.”

“Marvel hates her because she's pretty and doesn't have any kids to worry about.”

“I was always mortified.Didn't they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?”

“Now I wish 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 pa...”

“The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if som...”

“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.”

“Then came a time I can hardly describe, a section underground. A bird trapped in a sewer, wings beating against the ceiling in that dark wet place, while the city rumbled on overhead. Her name was ...”

“How it was. How it was the earth could open up under you and swallow you whole, close above you as if you never were. Like Persephone snatched by the god. The ground opened up and out he came, swee...”

“People were just like that. We couldn't even see each other, just the shadows moving, pushed by unseen winds.”

“This was an artist's stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions. It was a stare that didn't turn away when I stared back, but was startled to find itself returned.”

“Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life. It wasn't like I didn't know where all this remembering got you, all that hunger for beauty and astonishing cruelty and eve...”

“I had already seen more of the world, its beauty and misery and sheer surprise, than they could hope or fear to perceive.”

“Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Loneliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best you can do is kn...”