Tayari Jones Quotes & Sayings

Dwelling on pain, spending too much time immersed in it, tasting its flavors, fingering its textures
this makes it only more potent. — Tayari Jones

He says he can't see why I didn't "just" tell the truth. but the truth is denser than he can imagine, yet it's more delicate than my body; it's more complicated than any love that ever passed between the two of us. — Tayari Jones

But in truth, I was different now, burning and anointed. — Tayari Jones

Love is a maze. Once you get in it, you're pretty much trapped. Maybe you manage to claw your way out, but then what have you accomplished? — Tayari Jones

It's funny how three or four notes of anger can be struck at once, creating the perfect chord of fury. — Tayari Jones

Marriage is complicated. — Tayari Jones

I think the NAACP isn't recognized enough for all of the work it does, especially in the field of law. They may have faded from view over the last couple of decades, but they are fighting the good fight. — Tayari Jones

I don't mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn't a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated. — Tayari Jones

I do have a sister - I have two sisters. — Tayari Jones

I like straightforward names for my characters. When I get too symbolic with names or places, I start feeling like the characters and the story are less read, and I lose interest. — Tayari Jones

Nine Years Under is a sparkling debut
brimming with love and bursting with life. Booker's Baltimore is equal parts The Wire and The Cosby show. She doesn't shrink from the realities of life in an inner city funeral home, but she is also a loving witness, documenting the big hearted community that takes care of its own. Told with compassion, wit, and good old fashioned story telling, Sheri Booker gives us unforgettable characters who will make you laugh right up until they break your heart. — Tayari Jones

Dwayne is right: blood does call to blood. I was always waiting for hers to beckon to mine, but I never considered that it would be my blood that would call upon hers. — Tayari Jones

This, I now know, is how people go crazy and do things they regret. Look at the woman who almost killed Al Green.I am sure she cooked those grits, fully intending to eat them for breakfast. Then he did something that set her off. After that, she probably picked up the pot, just to scare him a little bit. Next thing she knew and the boiling grits were all over his face. There was a name for that kind of thing. "Crime of passion." It meant that it wasn't your fault. — Tayari Jones

Adolescence is a modern construct and very American in so many ways. — Tayari Jones

Our past is never past & there is no such thing as moving on... — Tayari Jones

The bitter scratch of his unshaven good-night kiss will always, for me, be the sensation of grief. — Tayari Jones

But I lived in a world where you could never want what you wanted out in the open. — Tayari Jones

I am always urging my students to honor their writing practice, to set up a schedule. — Tayari Jones

You can't tell your teacher that my name is James Witherspoon. Atlanta ain't nothing but a country town, and everyone knows everybody.
Your other wife and your other girl is a secret?, I asked him.
He put me down from his lap, so we could look each other in the face. No. You've got it the wrong way around. Dana you are the one that's a secret. — Tayari Jones

On the radio Smokey Robinson complained that a taste of honey is worse than none at all. — Tayari Jones

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess. — Tayari Jones

Although Hermione is right about a great many things, she was wrong about the nature of things gone by. this is what I have come to know: Our past is never passed and there is no such thing as moving on. but there is this telling and there is such a thing as passing through. — Tayari Jones

I guess this is how love is when it comes undone. No matter how tight you knit the stitches, a sharp tug on a loose thread will transform your warm sweater into a mangled heap of yarn that you can't reuse or repair. — Tayari Jones

Life is full of things you never figured on. — Tayari Jones

When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth. — Tayari Jones

If there was ever a time to boil up some grits it is now. — Tayari Jones

Remember that the writing itself is good for you. If your story is so close to home that you are afraid to write it, it probably means you need to write it. — Tayari Jones

She went about her business in a way that put me in mind of an old matchbook. You can scratch the head against the strip in the same way you always have but you are not going to get any kind of spark. — Tayari Jones

The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature. — Tayari Jones

Living here, you don't know anything about white people. Where I'm from, everything is mixed. In Atlanta, at least out here where we stay at, everything is so black that y'all don't know what it feels like to be black. — Tayari Jones

I am neither religious nor superstitious, but there is something otherworldly about the space where two roads come together. The devil is said to set up shop there if you want to swap your soul for something more useful. If you believe that God can be bribed, it's also the hallowed ground to make sacrifices. In the literal sense, it's also a place to change direction, but once you've changed it, you're stuck until you come to another crossroads, and who knows how long that will be. — Tayari Jones

Abandonment doesn't have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It's like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body. — Tayari Jones

He's your father, but first he is a man. A man is just a man, and that's all we have to wok with. — Tayari Jones

The key to life," he told me once, "is to avoid the highs and the lows. It's the peaks and valleys that mess you up. — Tayari Jones

What right did my father have to the details of my life? He squandered his chance to be the protective father. You can't come rushing to the rescue six months later. I wasn't a person to be saved only when it was a convenient time to swoop in. — Tayari Jones

Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature. — Tayari Jones

I was kind of an invisible girl when I was young. — Tayari Jones

I knew by then that I would never have my mother back, not in the way I had known her all my life. When you have seen your mother shattered, there's no putting her back together. There will always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she will never be stronger than a cracked plate. — Tayari Jones

I take mentoring very seriously and I am on the board of an organization called Girls Write Now, where we match teen girls and writing mentors because it changes their lives. — Tayari Jones

I wanted to live in a house with walls painted in various shades of blue and green, instead of the eggshell hue that screamed renter. — Tayari Jones

...and I wondered what it felt like to live inside such disloyal skin. — Tayari Jones

People say, That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you doesn't kill you. That's all you get. Sometimes, you just have to hope that's enough. — Tayari Jones

Some things were inevitable. You'd have to be a fool to think otherwise. — Tayari Jones

Silver" is what I called girls who were natural beauties but who also smoothed on a layer of pretty from a jar. It wasn't just how they looked, it was how they were. The name came from a song my mother sang sometimes when she was getting dressed to go out somewhere special. She sang along with Aretha Franklin at the end: "Sail on, silver girl ... Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way. — Tayari Jones

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends. — Tayari Jones

My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead. — Tayari Jones

And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart. — Tayari Jones