Janet Fitch

“Човек може да понесе всичко. Болката, която не можем да понесем, ни убива моментално.”

“Lovers who kill each other will blame it on the wind.”

“I wished I could draw the way her broad-shouldered body threw a shadow on the moonpale dust. How brave she looked just then.”

“Talk to me. Look up, I thought. But she didn't, only stopped and picked a sprig of alyssum to smell the honey. I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her.”

“You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you”

“What is real is always worth it.”

“God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.”

“In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn’t learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas.”

“A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. But I didn’t want to start. I knew how it would play. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.”

“Men... No matter how unappealing, each of them imagines he is somehow worthy.”

“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”

“If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.”

“There is no God, there is only what you want.”

“I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy,why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why.Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my pastwas my life.”

“His guitar bore his longing up into the darkness like sparks, a music profound in its objectless desire, beautiful beyond solace or solution”

“She kissed me on the mouth. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and I was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. I was confused, but not unwilling. I would have let her do anything to me.”

“The sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.”

“At night she began cooking things in the kitchen, things too strange to mention. She steeped oleander in boiling water, and the roots of a vine with white trumpet flowers that glowed like faces. She soaked a plant collected in moonlight from the neighbors’ fence, with little heart-shaped flowers. Then she cooked the water down; the whole kitchen smelled like green and rotting leaves. She threw out pounds of the wet-spinach green stuff into somebody else’s dumpster. She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She sat on the roof and talked to the moon.”

“She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in her white kimono, writing in a notebook with an ink pen she dipped in a bottle. 'Never let a man stay the night,' she told me. 'Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.' The night magic sounded lovely. Someday I would have lovers and write a poem after.”

“After all the fears, the warnings, after all, a woman's mistakes are different from a girl's. They are written by fire on stone. They are a trait and not an error.”

“No scorn like the scorn of an aging queen for a pretty girl with a crap fake DL.”

“It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.”

“How could I forget. I was her ghost daughter, sitting at empty tables with crayons and pens while she worked on a poem, a girl malleable as white clay. Someone to shape, instruct in the ways of being her. She was always shaping me. She showed me an orange, a cluster of pine needles, a faceted quartz, and made me describe them to her. I couldn’t have been more than three or four. My words, that’s what she wanted. ”What’s this?” she kept asking. ”What’s this?” But how could I tell her? She’d taken all the words.The smell of tuberoses saturated the night air, and the wind clicked through the palms like thoughts through my sleepless mind. Who am I? I am a girl you don’t know, mother. The silent girl in the back row of the classroom, drawing in notebooks. Remember how they didn’t know if I even spoke English when we came back to the country? They tested me to find out if I was retarded or deaf. But you never asked why. You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.I thought of Yvonne in our room, asleep, thumb in mouth, wrapped around her baby like a top. ”I can see her,” you said. You could never see her, Mother. Not if you stood in that room all night. You could only see her plucked eyebrows, her bad teeth, the books that she read with the fainting women on the covers. You could never recognize the kindness in that girl, the depth of her needs, how desperately she wanted to belong, that’s why she was pregnant again. You could judge her as you judged everything else, inferior, but you could never see her. Things weren’t real to you. They were just raw material for you to reshape to tell a story you liked better. You could never just listen to a boy playing guitar, you’d have to turn it into a poem, make it all about you.”

“Love's an illusion. It's a dream you wake up from with an enormous hangover and net credit debt. I'd rather have cash.”

“The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me.”

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

“All that was a dream, you couldn't hold on, you couldn't depend on frosted glass and Debussy.”

“Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.”

“We have no home, she told me. I am your home.”

“I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear aroung my neck. I wish a thousand-year sleep would find us, at this absolute second, like the sleep over the castle of Sleeping Beauty.”

“Her voice made me drunk, deep and sun-warmed, a hint of a foreign accent, Swedish singsong a generation removed.”

“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.”

“She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress”

“She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.”

“It sickens me to think of youa prevalence of voidunholyimmovabledamned. gifts.an overblown sense of his own importance.I wish you were dead.forget about you.crowflorid withfantasiesit's so awfula perfect imitationa liability to loveforget youIngrid Magnussenquite alonemasturbatingrotdisappointmentgrotesqueYour arms cradlepoisonsgarbagegrenadesLonelinesslong-distance criesforeverneverresponse.take everythingfeel me?the human conditionStopplotting murderpenitenceCultivate ityouforbidappealrageimportantIcringefuckyouinsanepersondissonant and querulousmygas tanks marked FULL”

“Beauty said there was something more than just one fucking thing after another. Time could rest for a moment, stop all that senseless motion.”

“I thought how tenuous the links were between mother and children between friends family things you think are eternal. Everything could be lost more easily than anyone could imagine.”

“I'm a fish swimming by...catch me if you want me.”

“There was no God there was only what you wanted.”

“I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.”

“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.”

“I didn't tell her about the free-for-alls on the school yard, muggings on the bus. A girl burned a cigarette hole in the back of another girl's shirt at nutrition right in front of me looking at me as if daring me to stop her. I saw a boy being threatened with a knife on the hallway outside my spanish class. Girls talked about their abortions in gym class. Claire didn't need to know about that. I wanted the world to be beautiful for her. I wanted things to work out. I always had a great day no matter what.”

“She’s never where she is,' I said. 'She’s only inside her head.”

“You want car?' Rena said. 'Artist college? You think I don't know? How you think you pay? So this dress. Pretty dress. Someone gave. But money is . . .' She stopped, struggling to find the words, what money was. Finally, she threw her hands up. 'Money. You want remember, so just remember.”

“Rena squinted at me, blowing a strand of her matte black hair out of her face, exasperated. 'You get good price for that. What you saving it for, tea with little Tsarevich Alexei? They shot him in 1918.' She took the dress out of the bag, shook it and hung it back up. 'Is fact.”

“I felt like an Israeli girl soldier, in shorts and the hot wind, sighting down the barrel of the rifle, holding the .38 with both hands. It was a strange feeling, him looking at me as I aimed. I found I couldn't quite lose myself in the target. His eyes split my attention between the C in Coke and my awareness of him watching me. And I thought, this was what it was like to be beautiful.”

“Just make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. 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.”

“without my wounds, who was i? my scars were my face, my past was my life.”

“They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers' braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.”

“What can she possibly teach you, twenty seven names for tears?”