quotes by Janet Fitch

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'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 you, someone to fill that space. And intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.'
"
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

""You've got to let go of who you were, to become who you will be." "
— Janet Fitch

"In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"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."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander: A Novel)

"I regret nothing. No woman with any self-respect would have done less. The question of good and evil will always be one of philosophy's most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. I'm not quarreling with your choice of issues, only with your intellectually diminished approach. If evil means to be self-motivated, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth cliches lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare to see is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind's destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race. "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. they learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gun powder in an old fashioned gun. then it exploded in your face on a november day in the rain."
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"The phoenix must burn to emerge."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"“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.”"
— Janet Fitch

"Dont 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.""
— Janet Fitch

"I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander (Oprah's Book Club))

""That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out." "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"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."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander (Oprah's Book Club))

"Oleander time, she said. Lover who kill each other now will blame it on the wind."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander: A Novel)

"I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached myself to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

""I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said.
"Why not?"
Why not? Because 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 then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. (...) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette. "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander (Oprah's Book Club))

"Let me tell you a few things about regret...There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?"
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander (Oprah's Book Club))

"A fish has no concept of water."
— Janet Fitch

"Her hatred glittered irresistibly. I could see it, the jewel, it was sapphire, it was the cold lakes of Norway."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander (Oprah's Book Club))

"I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. 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."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)