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How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.

Janet Fitch

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Janet Fitch
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: November 9
Author
Journalist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
LA
California
Janet Elizabeth Fitch
Stand
Fullness
Suffering
Awe
Care
Vast
Human
Survival
Humans
Capacity
Thing
Hold
Much
Question
Wasn
Oleanders

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The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.
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My house is modern, but I like my writing room to be old fashioned. I write on a little wooden secretary desk.
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I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages... and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.
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When I read, I want to be fully transported to another place. I want to feel things, smell things.
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Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.
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I wish my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.
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I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.
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Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched.
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It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.
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If sinners where so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?
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...The men eyed her with the automatic mix of curiosity, lust, and aesthetic judgment they always gave young women, subject to object, the way you'd stare at an animal. She pretended not to notice. To remind them she was a person was too much effort. Objects bore no guilt.
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Never apologize. Never explain.
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When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.
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Appealing to the five senses is the feature that will always set writing apart from the visual media. A good writer will tell us what the world smells like, what the textures are, what the sounds are, what the light looks like, what the weather is.
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Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.
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She kissed me on the mouth. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and I was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. I was confused, but not unwilling. I would have let her do anything to me.
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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.
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The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plan blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?
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How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
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I wondered where he was now whether I would ever hear him again. Whether someone would love him, someday show him what beauty mean't.
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