Janet Fitch Quotes - Page 7

This is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.

The sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.

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.

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

I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn't they just be bitter? They weren't like rattlesnakes, they didn't even eat what they killed. The way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn't want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn't a source of poison, but just another victim.

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.

...I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds.

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

The decor bowled me over. Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I'd never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother's contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that.

What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.

I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.

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.

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.

purification in fire. public cremation

Reading LOVE JUNKIE is like watching a sleepwalker taking a stroll on a freeway. All you can do is pray. Gorgeously written, piercingly honest.

They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled...mother's big enough, wide enough for us to hide in...mother's who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.

It wasn't awful to be dead. The stillness would almost be a relief. She wouldn't want pain, she wouldn't want to be wounded or mutilated. She could never shoot herself or jump off a building. But being dead wasn't unthinkable.

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

And I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.

And if there is no god? You act as if there is, and it's the same thing.

The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.

She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.

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.