Life & Wisdom Quote by Janet Fitch

Beauty, here, isn’t a blessing; it’s an alibi. Fitch flips the usual coming-of-age bargain (be pretty, be palatable, be forgiven) and treats beauty as the first lie society asks a wounded person to tell on its behalf. “Beauty was deceptive” lands like a refusal to participate in the soft-focus version of survival, where trauma gets repackaged as resilience and the audience gets to admire it without feeling implicated.

The imagery does the heavy lifting. “Torn and stitched” makes the body a visible record, not a metaphorical scar but a seam that announces violence and repair in the same breath. Then Fitch escalates: “a strip mine.” That’s not just damage; it’s extraction. Someone took what they wanted, left a crater, and moved on. It frames harm as industrial and systemic, not merely personal misfortune.

The most chilling pivot is the wish for disgust. Wanting to “make them sick” isn’t nihilism; it’s a demand for consequence. If pain can’t be undone, it can at least contaminate the comfort of the bystander. The dream line is the coup: public politeness can look away in daylight, but dreams are where the sanitized narratives break down. Fitch’s intent is confrontational empathy-by-force, dragging the reader from spectator to witness. The subtext is moral: if you benefit from a world that rewards surface and ignores ruins, you don’t get to stay clean.