Joshilyn Jackson Quotes & Sayings

I'd have to run away to New York and be a hooker and eat a pound of heroin and die. — Joshilyn Jackson

A pretty woman is a Christmas tree,' my mother told me in the airport. This fella is hanging things on my branches as his gaze sweeps from my face all the way down my body to my hips and then back to my face. Ideas fly from his widened eyes and land on me like teeny, decorative burdens. He is giving me shyness, maybe, some book smarts, and a certain yielding sweetness in bed. The oil-slick eyes get me, and I find myself hanging a few ornaments myself, giving him deft hands and a sense of humor. — Joshilyn Jackson

I had spent my whole life hungry for forgiveness. It had not come, so I didn't know firsthand what he was feeling. But I had imagined it, over and over. I'd wanted it so bad. I'd wanted Kai - or anyone, anyone who knew the worst in me - to say that I was still dear, and good, and worthy. — Joshilyn Jackson

Blind and naked as an unearthed mole, uncomprehending. — Joshilyn Jackson

I wanted her note to say that I was a red hole dug out of the guts of her, a seeping wound that hadn't healed a lick in the twenty-odd years since she had left me. — Joshilyn Jackson

I'd let him put his hand under my shirt, over the bra, where he kneaded with delighted disbelief at my booby. It had been super exciting, not really because it felt that great to have my booby treated like a yeast roll, but because we had both been so thrilled that I had let him touch it. — Joshilyn Jackson

I'd thought Clarice's smile was both too dim and friendly and too wide and white, so that she looked to me like the love child of a cannibal and a Labrador retriever. — Joshilyn Jackson

You have a person around for years, maybe you get fond of them even if they aren't really anything to you, and that struck me as huge and important in some way I couldn't get a good hold on. — Joshilyn Jackson

William knows that science and magic are the same thing; magic is only science that hasn't been explained yet. Tonight he has made chemistry into magic for her. — Joshilyn Jackson

God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us. — Joshilyn Jackson

I'd only wanted, desperately, for him to be a thing that I could have. — Joshilyn Jackson

The mildest allegiance was proof one parent was the rightest and the most beloved, and I refused to call the winner and the loser in their war. — Joshilyn Jackson

I've never had an angel on my right shoulder; I was born with a pointy-tailed devil, who crept back and forth across my neck to get his whispers into both my ears. — Joshilyn Jackson

Now, I don't think about it. Or when I did, I mostly felt a terrible relief. Truly terrible, like a person who's been told they no longer have to carry the weight of their own gangrenous and rotting left arm. It smells, it hurts, it's literally killing you - but it's still the only left arm that you'll ever have. — Joshilyn Jackson

I could feel the ghosts of all the girls I'd been behind me in the alleyway, creeping in my wake. I could almost hear my own footsteps as an echo. For a moment it was so real that I spooked myself. I stopped and turned to look. There was only silence and darkness. I walked on. — Joshilyn Jackson

I could break things in a thousand ways
anything from surgical dismantling as meticulous as a bomb squad work to wrecking ball style mass destruction. If I broke a thing, it stayed broke. If I broke one of my things, I lived with the pieces, or replaced it. — Joshilyn Jackson

This was another pretend, and here in a yard on a bench was his real wife, with sad, kind, tired eyes. The lesson of Mimmy and my dad was not for me. It was for her. It was for them. I was so sick with understanding that I was practically yelling at her. — Joshilyn Jackson

He was so beautiful. He wasn't mine. I should run to the mountains now, and hide. I should run right into his arms and demand that he close them around me. I should run home to my mother and cry into her lap. — Joshilyn Jackson

It wasn't like the news delighted her, nothing like. But I saw her get a tiny tickle in the schadenfreude as she registered that this happened on Dad's watch. — Joshilyn Jackson

People sin, Lena. People in love sin a lot. God invented sex. He knows how it works — Joshilyn Jackson

It's one thing to decide what you want. It's quite another to know how to get it. William doesn't know how, but he is trying. — Joshilyn Jackson

She was exactly like her house, expensive and elegant, but not at all comfortable. — Joshilyn Jackson

Miracle is another word for magic, and magic is only science, unexplained. — Joshilyn Jackson

Hail to thee Alabama, you verdant trollop. — Joshilyn Jackson

Sex was where laurel knew she knew him, and talking was the way she called him to her. — Joshilyn Jackson

This is what Liza knows: People go under. They fall off the world, they go beneath and drown and die. Sometimes, nothing saves you ... Liza knows how black the world is, how fast it spins, and how you have to take the taste of apples and the smell of your little girl's orange zest shampoo where you find them. You have to hold these things and strive, always, for one more word and one more step. You push forward and you fight, for as long as ever you can, until the black world spins and the moon pulls the tide and the water rises up and takes you. — Joshilyn Jackson

...nothing helps a lie float like a hopeful listener. — Joshilyn Jackson

It's a thing I am, not a thing I do. I can't stop being it. — Joshilyn Jackson

I had been born and mostly raised in the South, so I ought to have been able to find a way to reach him. Southern girls are trained from birth up that the way to a man's heart is never through the front door. They may leave a basket of cookies there, and while he's busy picking them up, they're squirming in through a back window. — Joshilyn Jackson

The way we ended things was not uncommon for kids like us. She said we'd lost enough in our short lives to want to cauterize our wounds before they happened. We burned our connection closed before we felt the holes. — Joshilyn Jackson

Young men, romantics, call it love at first sight, but even then I understood it was only prettiness. Young men see pretty, and they start hanging all the things they hope you'll be onto you till you're so weighed down you can't move. — Joshilyn Jackson

There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. — Joshilyn Jackson

It was more like when I was little and used to run everywhere for the sheer fun of fast moving. — Joshilyn Jackson

The things that happen to me just make me more me. — Joshilyn Jackson

I was looking for my ex-lover to break the Sixth Commandment. — Joshilyn Jackson

Oh that's right, you never lie unless your mouth is open and words are coming out of it — Joshilyn Jackson

He knows me so well. I don't have to say it. Not any of it. Not yet. There will be time for it later. For now, it is enough. It is enough and it is easy. Easy to walk the last few steps between us. Easy and so beautiful to step into his arms.
He kisses me. He kisses me.
I kiss him back. — Joshilyn Jackson

He was treating me like something breakable, which is different from how you treat something you yourself have broken. — Joshilyn Jackson

Sometimes karma takes years to pay a person back, but that day, it had a fast backhand return ... — Joshilyn Jackson

My plan was to go on my run, grab Ms. Fancy, drive like a cocaine-attled hell bat to the airport and hurl her and her bags out as I slowed down in the drop off lane. — Joshilyn Jackson

He had lost his child; he knew how fast things could spin out of control. He knew a person could lose anything in half a heartbeat. — Joshilyn Jackson

You picked a man who can read tax code and date a celibate for two years. That's some serious patience. I have zero doubt in my ability to wait you out. I have zero doubt that you're meant to be my girl. — Joshilyn Jackson

THE STORIES WE TELL fearlessly explores the textures of the human heart, finding a path toward hope through a Savannah that is jagged with class issues, faith misused, and broken trust. Henry loses you in a landscape peopled with secret keepers, storytellers and liars, and proves that in the end, love is the only reliable compass. This is everything you expect from Patti Callahan Henry - lyrical writing, characters worth rooting for, a sure-footed belief in the power of goodness - plus a twisty plot that will keep the pages turning long into the night. — Joshilyn Jackson

What had he been Thinking? If a fella was looking for love, I was the wrong road to go down. I was the road, in fact, that was crawling with barbed wire and bears and dynamite, marked with huge signs that said THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU HERE. — Joshilyn Jackson

In families, he realized, children are added to, not superseded. The addition of a child is not a betrayal of previous or current children. — Joshilyn Jackson

Hail to thee, Alabama, thou verdant trollop! — Joshilyn Jackson

I want to thank you, first, Person Who Bought This Book. Because of you, I have a job I love. Because of you, the people in my head get to live outside of it. When I meet you, you talk about my characters as if they are old friends (or enemies) we have in common; I cannot explain how miraculous this feels. If you are one of those people who have put my books into the hands of other readers - either professionally as a god-called lunatic who loves books so much you hand-sell them or as a reader who picked one for book club or gave it to your best friend for a birthday - well. This book exists because of you. I hope you are happy about this. I am - happy and grateful and a little bit in love with you. — Joshilyn Jackson

Saying it it loud, she felt every inch of distance between them. — Joshilyn Jackson

You're saying things you can't take back. And you don't even mean them. — Joshilyn Jackson

The wold was full of us, the leftovers and the leavers, the bereaved and the broken. — Joshilyn Jackson

A whole slew of them lived outside Immita on a big piece of trailer-dotted land everyone called Ducktown, and they were all cousins and brothers and aunts with one another so many times over that it was hard to tell who was exactly related and how. Growing up, I'd had six or so in school right around my grade, but I was a sophomore now, and only one was left. Either the rest had failed so many times I'd left them behind by middle school or they had plain dropped out. OMG — Joshilyn Jackson

I step straight toward the female librarian. She looks soft, as if she's been raised in a box and purely milk-fed, like veal. — Joshilyn Jackson

I would take today's joy, and tomorrow's. I would take it with both hands, anywhere it came. — Joshilyn Jackson