01c. 1955 ADLove is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you, changes its mind. But hatred, now, that's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
03c. 1955 ADWhenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
04c. 1955 ADdon't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live underneath them.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
05c. 1955 ADHer 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.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
06c. 1955 ADDon't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
07c. 1955 ADMy heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
08c. 1955 ADI wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of the water, the chink of the dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the trees, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I wished a sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like sleep over the castle of sleeping beauty.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
10c. 1955 ADNow it seemed unbelievable, the innocence of a girl in a fairy tale.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
11c. 1955 ADWho are you? the band sang. I tried to remember but I really couldn't say.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
12c. 1955 ADMarvel hates her because she's pretty and doesn't have any kids to worry about.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
13c. 1955 ADI was always mortified.Didn't they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?Janet Fitch / quote ↗
14c. 1955 ADNow I wish she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
15c. 1955 ADThe pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
16c. 1955 ADHis 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.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
17c. 1955 ADI 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.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
18c. 1955 ADMy mother never met a gadget she didn't like. There were tube pans for baking the angel food cakes my father could have after his first heart attack, and Bundt pans and loaf pans and baking pans and grilling pans.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
19c. 1955 ADI always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
21c. 1955 ADA lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.Janet Fitch / quote ↗
