Love Quote by Janet Fitch

Fitch turns memorization into a kind of private infrastructure: not a tasteful hobby, but a prophylactic. “Learn poems by heart” isn’t a quaint nod to schoolroom recitation; it’s a demand that language be installed beneath consciousness, where it can’t be scrolled past or argued away. The body metaphors do the heavy lifting. “Marrow in your bones” suggests poetry as something you don’t merely carry but manufacture life with, a deep-tissue resource you draw on when the surface self is tired, frightened, or compromised.

Then she swerves into an unexpectedly municipal image: “Like fluoride in the water.” It’s funny in a dry, slightly menacing way. Fluoride is mundane, collective, invisible; you don’t feel it working until you don’t have it. Fitch frames poems the same way: quiet, daily exposure that hardens you over time. The comparison also hints at controversy and coercion (fluoride debates, the ethics of medicating a public). Subtext: you may not choose the world that shapes you, so choose your counter-agent deliberately.

The phrase “the world’s soft decay” is the real antagonist. Not catastrophe, not villainy - the slow rot of distraction, cynicism, cheap language, numbing entertainment, compromised attention. “Soft” makes it intimate and seductive; decay you consent to. Fitch’s intent is less about becoming cultured than becoming impermeable: poetry as an internal immune system, a durable cadence you can return to when everything around you is losing structure.