Janet Fitch Quotes - Page 8

She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.

I'm a fish swimming by...catch me if you want me.

The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plan blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?

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

Don't turn over the rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

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

I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

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.

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

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

Never apologize. Never explain.

Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battle ground.

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

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

Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.

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

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.

Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway.

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.

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

I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.

I felt suddenly cruel, like I´d told dmall children there was no tooth fairy, that it was just their Mom sneaking into their room after they went to bed.

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.

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