Time & Perspective Quote by Janet Fitch

Janet Fitch’s line reads like a dare tossed into the sentimental junk drawer. “Don’t hoard the past. Don’t cherish anything. Burn it.” is deliberately brutal, a controlled act of vandalism against the cozy cultural script that healing means keeping everything, labeling it, and calling it wisdom. Fitch is attacking nostalgia not as memory but as possession: the kind of emotional property law that turns old pain into an identity and old love into a shrine.

The subtext is craft. For a working writer, “cherishing” can become a form of aesthetic taxidermy: preserving experiences so carefully they stop moving. Fitch proposes the opposite ethic: metabolize the past, don’t museum it. Burning isn’t mere rejection; it’s transformation, a violent editing process where attachment gets converted into material. The imperative voice matters here. She’s not offering a gentle self-help suggestion; she’s staging an intervention, because the temptation to hoard is persistent and socially rewarded.

Then comes the mythic pivot: “The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.” That image rescues the earlier harshness from nihilism. The phoenix doesn’t burn out; it burns through. Fitch frames creation as self-incineration: the ego, the narrative you tell about yourself, the preciousness around experience. What survives is not the relic but the work.

Contextually, it sits squarely in a late-20th/early-21st-century literary sensibility that distrusts purity and prizes reinvention: art as alchemy, not confession. The line works because it’s both threat and promise, asking for sacrifice while implying a payoff only artists are vain enough to believe in.