The collection / 93 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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93 results · Page 2 of 4Play this collection ▷

01Undated

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 / quote

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02Undated

She had forgotten about this, the narcotic of the crowd. This is why you came to hear music. To stop being yourself, to let that thing that you supposedly were go, and just be part of a mob, synchronized by the heavy beat, mesmerized by a singer with big smeary red lips, her spooky chant.

Janet Fitch / quote

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03Undated

I couldn't stop thinking about the body, what a hard fact it was.That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should havespent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He'dhave had to change his whole philosophy. The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its finethoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch howeasily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain.

Janet Fitch / quote

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04Undated

This was how girls left. They packed up their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives.

Janet Fitch / quote

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05Undated

We tried not to be in the same room at the same time when Starr was home, we set the air on fire between us.

Janet Fitch / quote

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06Undated

Never let a man stay the night,” she told me. “Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.

Janet Fitch / quote

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07Undated

...and I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.

Janet Fitch / quote

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08Undated

The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy’s most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself. If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth clichés 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 / quote

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09Undated

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 / quote

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10Undated

He was obsessed with obituaries. She'd never read them before, he couldn't believe it, to him it was like someone who'd never read the funnies...Michael always wanted to know what they died of- accidental gunshot wounds, overdose, cancer. 'Was it suicide?' That's what he really wanted to know.

Janet Fitch / quote

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11Undated

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.

Janet Fitch / quote

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12Undated

I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favourite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.

Janet Fitch / quote

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13Undated

I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy,why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why.Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my pastwas my life.

Janet Fitch / quote

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14Undated

A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter.

Janet Fitch / quote

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15Undated

She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.

Janet Fitch / quote

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16Undated

Never let a man stay the night. Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.

Janet Fitch / quote

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17Undated

don't sulk. you're acting just like a man.

Janet Fitch / quote

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18Undated

Men... No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.

Janet Fitch / quote

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19Undated

She’s never where she is,' I said. 'She’s only inside her head.

Janet Fitch / quote

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20Undated

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. An 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 / quote

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21Undated

Loneliness ia a human condition

Janet Fitch / quote

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22Undated

I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.

Janet Fitch / quote

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23Undated

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

Janet Fitch / quote

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24Undated

Who am I? I am who I say I am and tomorrow someone else entirely. You are too nostalgic, you want memory to secure you, console you. The past is a bore. What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned. Imagination uses what it needs and discards the rest— where you want to erect a museum. Don't hoard the past, Astrid. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

Janet Fitch / quote

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