It’s such a liability to love another person… it’s like playing catch with grenades.
Catalog
Janet Fitch
Janet Fitch (born November 9, 1955) is most famously known as the author of the Oprah's Book Club novel White Oleander, which became a film in 2002. She is a graduate of Reed College, located in Portland, Oregon. Janet Fitch was born in Los Angeles, a third-generation native, and grew up in a family of voracious readers. As an undergraduate at Reed College, Fitch had decided to become a historian, attracted to its powerful narratives, the scope of events, the colossal personalities, and the potency and breadth of its themes. But when she won a student exchange to Keele University in England, where her passion for Russian history led her, she awoke in the middle of the night on her twenty-first birthday with the revelation she wanted to write fiction. Janet Fitch is a faculty member in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, where she teaches fiction. Two of her favorite authors are Fyodor Dostoevsky and Edgar Allan Poe. Her third novel, Paint It Black, named after the Rolling Stones song of the same name, was published in September 2006. The movie version is in the work
I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.
Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife.
...find...someone who will tremble for your touch...Someone whose fingers are a poem.
It's such a liability to love another person...it's like playing catch with grenades.
To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful.
You could never recognize the kindness in that girl, the depth of her needs, how desperately she wanted to belong.
I don’t know how to express that being with someone so dangerous was the last time I felt safe.
She was transparent, heartbreaking. I would be afraid to be so vulnerable. I’d spent the last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I wouldn’t drip with blood every time I brushed up against something. She was naked, she peeled herself daily.
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception.…
Prostitute. Whore. What did they really mean anyway? Only words. Words trailing their streamers of judgment. I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots -- prostitute, housewife, saint -- like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as…
She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.
It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.
You could never recognize the kindness in that girl, the depth of her needs, how desperately she wanted to belong.
The phoenix must burn to emerge.
Don’t attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you’re lonely. Loneliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best you can do is know yourself… know what you want.
It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.