A cliché is everything you've ever heard of.

— Janet Fitch

A lot of people think they should be happy all the time. But the writer understands you need both. You need the whole piano: the richness of the whole human experience. Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.

— Janet Fitch

Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched....

— Janet Fitch

Always learn poems by heart,' she said. 'They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

— Janet Fitch

Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.

— Janet Fitch

A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter.

— Janet Fitch

And if there is no god? You act as if there is, and it's the same thing.

— Janet Fitch

...and I thought, there was no God, there was only what you wanted.

— Janet Fitch

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

— Janet Fitch

A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it

— Janet Fitch