513 Quotes by Janet Fitch

I lay my Webster’s on the scrubbed table in the lantern light, to learn that flotsam is the debris left from shipwreck, while jetsam is merchandise thrown overboard from a ship in crisis to lighten the load.

But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?

I tried on Claire’s double strand of pearls in the mirror, ran the smooth, lustrous beads through my fingers, touched the coral rose of the clasp. 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.

The smell of the smoke always brought me back to my mother, to a rooftop under an untrustworthy moon. How beautiful she had been, how perfectly unhinged.

I had been moving too fast. I had been too hungry to become a woman.

My mother was not herself in the time of the Santa Anas. I was twelve years old and I was afraid for her.

One death did not salve another.

So now I was supposed to feel pity for you and those other women who’d lost their own children during a holdup, a murder, a fiesta of greed? Save your poet’s sympathy and find some better believer. Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.

I was more his child than he knew. But my womanhood had put a permanent barrier between us. He didn’t know how to be the father of a woman, and womanhood could not be undone. The future already a fact.