Quote

Pick a better verb. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an A-bomb.

Janet Fitch

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Janet Fitch
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: November 9
Author
Journalist
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
LA
California
Janet Elizabeth Fitch
Better
Bombs
Everything
Describe
Stocking
Writing
Twenty
Stockings
People
Twenties
Verb
Pick
Explosion
Picks
Verbs
Use
Explosions
Running
Bomb

More quotes by Janet Fitch

Image
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
Image
But I knew one more thing. That people w ho denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.
Janet Fitch
Image
I wanted to hear what she was saying. I wanted to smell that burnt midnight again, I wanted to feel that wind. It was a secret wanting, like a song I couldn't stop humming, or loving someone I could never have. No matter where I went, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.
Janet Fitch
Image
She was not used to being cruel, but he had taught her how.
Janet Fitch
Image
Her 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
Image
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
Image
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.
Janet Fitch
Image
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
Image
Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.
Janet Fitch
Image
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
Image
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.
Janet Fitch
Image
We have no home, she told me. I am your home.
Janet Fitch
Image
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
Image
She should think about her own soul, what she was going to do with this funky tattered pond dank item. Dark and stained, a ruined thing.
Janet Fitch
Image
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.
Janet Fitch
Image
I was always mortified.Didn't they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?
Janet Fitch
Image
I wish my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.
Janet Fitch
Image
It's all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.
Janet Fitch
Image
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
Image
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