Life & Wisdom Quote by Janet Fitch

Fitch zeroes in on suffering not as a plot obstacle but as a measure of interior scale. The first move is deliberately unsentimental: “How vast” frames pain as an expanse, something almost geographic, and the posture she prescribes isn’t self-pity or heroism but “awe.” That word is doing sly work. Awe is what we reserve for mountains, cathedrals, storms - experiences that dwarf the ego. By treating endurance as sublime, Fitch refuses the usual self-help bargain where pain must “teach a lesson” to be legitimate. It just is, and it’s enormous.

Then she pivots: “It wasn’t a question of survival at all.” Survival is the cultural baseline, the Instagrammable comeback narrative. Fitch rejects it as too small. The real drama is “fullness,” a term that sounds like abundance and appetite, not deprivation. Suffering becomes less a test of toughness than a test of capacity: how much can a person contain without turning numb, cruel, or indifferent?

The final cadence - “how much could you hold, how much could you care” - reveals the subtext: pain’s most frightening consequence isn’t death, it’s contraction. Fitch is interested in the ethics of feeling. Caring, in her framing, is not a soft virtue; it’s a strenuous act of staying porous when experience pressures you to shut down. Contextually, it fits her fiction’s fixation on coming-of-age through damage: the world doesn’t merely wound you, it dares you to remain emotionally spacious anyway.