513 Quotes by Janet Fitch

I hate people,” he said, wiping the urchin’s face with the rag. “Animals are more noble. Look at this boy. He’s poor and desperate, but can they see it? Can they pity him? No. They should embrace him. They should save their kicks and blows for the bastards who keep them so poor, who set them on each other like dogs.

I imagined Kandinsky’s mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.

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.

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...

Claire made me think it was worth trying. Of course you took the honors classes. Of course you wore your jewelry. Of course you signed up for art classes at the museum. Of course. In.

I’ll tell you this: history is the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall. It groans. It smells like ozone before a storm.

This dumb show of privilege – the quartet, the stylized flowers of stained glass, the illumination of the skylights. Yet it was beautiful. Did beauty have to be shameful? I wished there was someone I could ask.

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.

His trips home were handholds for her, so she could swing from one square on the calendar to the next. When he said he was going to come home and didn’t, she swung forward and grasped thin air, fell.