Janet Fitch Quotes

There is a part of me that is not fulfilled by acting. It is a self-involved life; it can feel shallow, but not very often.

Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don't get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell.

Be careful..you're all I've got left, to remind me who I really am.

It's only ... when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.

Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me...my lonely is mine.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.

It is a sad thing to look at happiness only through another's eyes.

Be good, and you will be lonesome, be lonesome and you will be free. Live a lie and you will live to regret it, that's what living is to me.

... when I am really alone some power seems to grow in me. ... Conjugality made me think of a three-legged race, where two people cannot go fast and keep tripping each other because their two legs are tied together.

How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

All humans are frightened of their own solitude. But only in solitude can we learn to know ourselves, learn to handle our own eternal aloneness.

To be ignorant or unconvinced of one's own needs has become the unforgivable anti-social act. The good citizen is one who imputes standardized needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for alternatives, much less the renunciation of need.

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world's greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self-deprecatio n, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight. Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.

In other living creatures the ignorance of themselves is nature, but in men it is a vice.

Competing is exciting and winning is exhilarating, but the true prize will always be the self-knowledge and understanding that you have gained along the way.

If you’re 35 and single and it’s a choice, it feels fine. So I didn’t settle with the wrong person yet. Big deal!

That was the biggest problem with getting used to someone, she thought. You were lonely when they weren't there.

When the mind soars in pursuit of the things conceived in space...it pursues emptiness; but when man dives deep within himself, he experiences the fullness of existence.

I was raised by somebody with the perception of trying to allow me the space and show me the importance of knowing who I was and figuring out who I was and appreciating who I was.

He who knows himself knows others.