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 water.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the idea that people cannot be easily categorized and are instead complex and ever-changing beings.
Janet Fitch's quote reflects on the complexity of human identity, emphasizing that individuals resist being confined to simplistic labels such as 'prostitute' or 'saint'. It suggests that just as water is fluid and adaptable, so too are humans influenced by their emotions, desires, and circumstances, highlighting the importance of recognizing the depth and variability of each person's character.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of identity and societal roles, this quote would illustrate the importance of seeing beyond labels.
How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
I nodded. A man's world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you get raped or beat up? A man's world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money,and didn't have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.
Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.
Death like a lover, caressing him, promising him peace, running its fingers through his hair, its tongue in his ear. She put her own two fingers in her mouth. Im so sorry. And pulled the trigger
Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.
I wanted to hear what she was saying. I wanted to smell that burnt midnight again, I wanted to feel that wind. It was a secret wanting, like a song I couldn't stop humming, or loving someone I could never have. No matter where I went, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.
The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one's life.
Imagine that each time you inhale, that the universe is breathing into you, and as you exhale it is breathing out of you.
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
People always talk about good time rock and roll, Chuck Berry or whatever, like this liberating force for feeling good. But what I need in my life is to be liberated into feeling bad. Not sad. I have plenty of sad. What I need is a place where I can spray anger in sparks like a gnarled piece of electrical cable. Just be mad at stuff and soak in the helplessness.
I am in fact, a hobbit in all but size
Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.