Life & Wisdom Quote by Janet Fitch

A line like "What is real is always worth it" reads like a dare disguised as comfort. Fitch, whose fiction often treats intimacy as both refuge and hazard, isn’t praising authenticity because it’s trendy; she’s insisting it’s expensive. The sentence is built like a moral law: not "usually" worth it, not "worth it if", but always. That absolutism is the point. It challenges the reader’s most common bargaining tactic: accepting a lesser version of love, art, or selfhood because it feels safer, cleaner, easier to manage.

The intent is quietly corrective. "Real" here isn’t just truth-telling; it’s contact. The kind that risks rejection, complicates your story about yourself, breaks the spell of curated performances. Fitch’s subtext is that unreality is seductive precisely because it offers control. You can polish it, rehearse it, monetize it, keep it at a distance. Reality, by contrast, is messy: other people’s needs, consequences you can’t edit, grief that doesn’t respect your timeline. Saying it’s "worth it" isn’t naive; it’s an argument against the short-term logic of avoidance.

Contextually, the line lands as an antidote to eras of aestheticized detachment: the impulse to turn pain into content, relationships into branding, vulnerability into a pose. Fitch’s claim refuses the loophole. If you want the thing that actually feeds you - love that changes you, art that tells on you, a life that isn’t performed - you pay in discomfort. The reward isn’t purity; it’s being awake.