Time & Perspective Quote by Janet Fitch

Fitch takes the most feared evidence of living - bodily change, damage, aging - and reframes it as curation. “Gallery” and “canvas” are doing heavy cultural work here: they pull scars out of the medical or cosmetic register (what’s “wrong” with you) and place them in the aesthetic one (what you’ve made, what you can show). The line doesn’t just romanticize pain; it performs a small act of defiance against a world that treats unmarked skin as virtue and visible history as a flaw to be edited out.

The intent is reclamation. “How right” reads like a corrective, as if the speaker has been sold the usual fantasy of preservation and is now rejecting it with relief. That opening approval gives the sentence moral force: change isn’t tragedy or failure, it’s accuracy. Fitch’s phrasing also sidesteps the easy hero narrative. “Capacity to endure it” is blunt, almost weary. Endurance is not triumphal; it’s survival with receipts.

Subtextually, the body becomes autobiography when language can’t hold everything. Scars are proof of stakes - of love, violence, illness, childbirth, accidents, self-harm, recovery - without specifying which, making the line widely inhabitable. Context matters: Fitch’s fiction often traffics in beauty, trauma, and the politics of being seen. This quote lands in that territory, where the gaze can be punitive, and visibility becomes its own kind of courage.