I usually start with something that has some energy, like a compressed character or a situation that's wound up like a spring. Then all I have to do is let it go, let its energy carry the story. And that may not turn out to be the beginning of the book.

Janet Fitch

Categorized in : Book Character Spring

 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

loneliness disappointment inspirational

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

tattoo artist mind

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 something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard, or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.

Janet Fitch

hatred mind love-is

Don't 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

space lonely attention

How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it.

Janet Fitch

scar becoming body

Find someone who will tremble for your touch, someone whose fingers are a poem.

Janet Fitch

touch-someone fingers

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

Janet Fitch

landscape dimensions memories

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.

Janet Fitch

guitar ocean sea

You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know.

Janet Fitch

elements movement thinking

It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.

Janet Fitch

oleanders natural want

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.

Janet Fitch

tunnels loneliness soul

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

just-being hurt way

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

Janet Fitch

ivory dry tables

The 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

lost-ones oysters white

Don't hoard the past. Don't cherish anything. Burn it. The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.

Janet Fitch

phoenix artist past

Now 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

july broken wish

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

Janet Fitch

phoenix failure inspiring

It's such a liability to love another person.

Janet Fitch

liability persons

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

turtles floating sea

Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul. He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person,' he said. 'You can never go home.

Janet Fitch

ashes want home