Quote

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: 69
Born: 1955
Born: November 9
Author
Journalist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
LA
California
Janet Elizabeth Fitch
Suffering
Awe
Care
Vast
Human
Survival
Humans
Capacity
Thing
Hold
Much
Question
Wasn
Oleanders
Stand
Fullness

More quotes by Janet Fitch

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Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.
Janet Fitch
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One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.
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I'm a fish swimming by...catch me if you want me.
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We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental.
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The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.
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Dawn tinted the darkness like water ink.
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Panic was the worst thing. When you panicked, you couldn't see possibilities. Then came despair.
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We read so that we can be moved by a new way of looking at things.
Janet Fitch
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Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.
Janet Fitch
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I thought of my mother as Queen Christina, cool and sad, eyes trained on some distant horizon. That was where she belonged, in furs and palaces of rare treasures, fireplaces large enough to roast a reindeer, ships of Swedish maple.
Janet Fitch
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The sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.
Janet Fitch
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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
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I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.
Janet Fitch
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A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you've already written. Often the story you're looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.
Janet Fitch
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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?
Janet Fitch
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I'm incredibly restless. I read a lot of poetry. I also find myself reading the first 20 pages of everything, looking for something. And you know what? I'm usually looking for the book I'm writing. And it's not out there!
Janet Fitch
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The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box.
Janet Fitch
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We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house.
Janet Fitch
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That kind of tenderness couldn't be permitted to last. You only got a taste, enough to know what perfection meant, and then you paid for it the rest of your life. Like the guy chained to a rock, who stole fire. The gods made an eagle eat his liver for all eternity. You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal.
Janet Fitch
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Let me tell you a few things about regret...There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?
Janet Fitch