The Revolution of Marina M. Quotes

“I suppose they cannot imagine what a person might be called upon to endure, when a line of poetry can mean the difference between strength and despair.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“At times like this I surprise myself, how I’ve managed to create something of a life on this foggy shore out of the broken pieces of myself, scavenged from the sea like flotsam. Or is it jetsam…it irks me not to know the difference.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“I’ll tell you this: history is the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall. It groans. It smells like ozone before a storm.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“I was more his child than he knew. But my womanhood had put a permanent barrier between us. He didn’t know how to be the father of a woman, and womanhood could not be undone. The future already a fact.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“What if he…” But I didn’t want to say die…dying was a matter for professionals, not poets.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“I hate people,” he said, wiping the urchin’s face with the rag. “Animals are more noble. Look at this boy. He’s poor and desperate, but can they see it? Can they pity him? No. They should embrace him. They should save their kicks and blows for the bastards who keep them so poor, who set them on each other like dogs.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“I saw that miracles were shocking, as overwhelming as disasters”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“One death did not salve another.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“This dumb show of privilege—the quartet, the stylized flowers of stained glass, the illumination of the skylights. Yet it was beautiful. Did beauty have to be shameful? I wished there was someone I could ask.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“I wanted to put words between us, like spikes, to keep myself from falling into him like a girl without bones.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“but for poetry one needs one’s native tongue. The voice of the soul is not so easily translated.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“Those who love poetry, even my unreadable foreign brand, are a tender breed.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“All this time, masquerading as a nice, well-bred girl when I was a stream in flood, a length of fire, the fall of a hawk.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“When I’d been with Kolya, I’d been the moon, and he was the sun: he could give me his warmth or withhold it, pursue me or forget me.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“Father turned on me as if blackbirds had flown out of my mouth.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“Abdication, a great brass bell, solemn, resonant, deafening.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“My freckles felt like they would burst into flame.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“There were lockouts, bread riots. And absurdly, I turned seventeen right in the middle of it all. Ridiculous. An insult to celebrate such a thing when the whole country was sliding into the abyss.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“Do go on,” I said, and it sounded just like Mother. It just came out.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“Wait for me, you said. Then left me alone in the echoing world.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“No one considered that a key might lock as well as unlock.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“I lay my Webster’s on the scrubbed table in the lantern light, to learn that flotsam is the debris left from shipwreck, while jetsam is merchandise thrown overboard from a ship in crisis to lighten the load.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“If I knew him better I’d tell him the danger of trusting to solid things. It’s an illusion.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“So much for those gleanings from novels, from paintings, as if love were a matter of posing in picturesque dishabille. No. You went into it as a tiger encountering another tiger. You went into it like a person jumping off a bridge.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.

“You talk to the night
I was her first, you say.
And you'll say
You knew me once
When my dress was made of autumn leaves
And my hair a smoldering fire
As you smoke your cigar
Sip whisky with its peaty smoke.
Memory fades, but never that.
A kiss among furs,
Another kind of fire.”
― Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M.