Janet Fitch Quotes

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

When you have a fresh point of view that comes from the right side of the heart, it's just so valuable. You can take it or not take it, but just that perspective can give you a lot of strength or make you reflect on a lot of things.

When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.

I don't know whether your heart ever necessarily changes, but time changes the way that you perceive the world. And you just hope it gives you more empathy and all those other things.

Reading opens your mind and helps you understand and empathize with people who are unlike you and outside your breadth of experience.

You can't change what you don't understand.

The more you understand yourself, the more you will understand the world.

A real love letter is made of insight, understanding, and compassion. Otherwise it's not a love letter. A true love letter can produce a transformation in the other person, and therefore in the world. But before it produces a transformation in the other person, it has to produce a transformation within us. Some letters may take the whole of our lifetime to write.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

He who knows others is clever; He who knows himself has discernment.

It is often said that reading is a gift, but to my mind that is an insufficient description, for the size of the gift of reading is so vast that it is difficult to see what is outside its wrapping.

When you were in love, you were capable of learning everything and of knowing things you had never dared even to think, because love was the key to understanding all of the mysteries.

He who knows himself knows others.

We read books to find out who we are.

To understand another human being you must gain some insight into the conditions which made him what he is.

I've become a lot wiser over the years.

We are wiser than we know.

Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.

If you read, the world is your oyster. It truly is. Reading makes everything possible.

The biggest piece of advice I have is - listen. Don't jump to the answer or what you think the answer is. The more you listen, the more you learn.

The longer you live, the smarter you get because you've been around. You've seen things. You've gone through different emotional experiences in your own life, and hopefully, you understand things better. And that makes you a better actress.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

Both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom: the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come.

A film can open hearts and minds that have been closed, for whatever reasons.