Janet Fitch

“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand...”

“Isn't it funny. I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's someth...”

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

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

“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand...”

“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.”

“Always learn poems by heart,' she said. '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.”

“The phoenix must burn to emerge.”

“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.”

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

“A cliche is everything you've ever heard of.”

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

“Remember...we don't see objects, we see light. [...] Light can do anything water can do--flow, wash, trickle. It can do anything an artist can do--paint, burnish, carve. Candlelight falls, l...”

“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 wo...”

“Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.”

“I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.”

“When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder...”

“Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.”

“My mother was an enthusiastic chef but wildly disorganized, and often preferred purchasing yet another jar of mace or chili powder rather than having to hunt down its last incarnation.”

“I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.”