Jackie Kay Quotes

How bizarre, i think to myself, to be on a train and to actually not want to arrive anywhere? What kind of madness is that?

Some men fall in love with a woman,
Some women fall in love with a man,
Some men fall in love with another man,
Some women fall in love with another woman -
But I, my dear one, fell in love with Shetland.

- Shetland

She walked on and on as though if she walked far enough she might walk this thing out of her. As if by walking long enough, hard enough, she might forget.

In my head maybe it was a test of love, because there are things about illness which I find revolting.

It's as if my footprints were already on the road before I even got there.I walk into them, my waiting footprints.

Sometimes you remember your life in photographs that were never taken.

I've started to feel very odd within my own life. It's most peculiar to feel lonely inside your own life.

You cannot penalize a man for one slip. Then she lay wondering about the word slip. When you slip, you fall, but maybe it is not such a sore fall because you have slipped.

How blazing and alive the past is. The color of the wallpaper in the bedroom you had as a girl. It's not so much that you've lost your memory, more like you're submerged in it, like you're living in the brightly vivid underwater world of the past.

Weather here in this part of the world is just as moody, just as subjective and disloyal, as people.

These days I can't tell what I really feel.

The tall trees, compassionate, understood everything:
grief - they stood stock-still, branches drooped in despair;
fear - they exposed their many roots, tugged their gold hair;
anger - they shook in the storm, pointed their bony fingers.

- The World of Trees (inspired by the Forest of Burnley)

What a thing it is to have music that plays your terrible thoughts. I imagined that one piece could drive more delicate women than myself to insanity.

Life is too short to argue about time.

Do things in your own time. Everybody should like how they choose. We never know what goes behind the blinds.

I think I'll get a nut roast. Maybe a nut roast is too lesbian?

My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That's what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation.

When it rains like that, dark in the afternoon, you feel like you've been taken into the past.

When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.

Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence. A strong presence right next to me. I look at it. It doesn't look like anything, that's what is so strange. It just fits in.

The beautiful have so much easier a time of it than the ugly, don't you think? They get smiled at the whole time. Strangers offer them things. People notice the beautiful; the beautiful are constantly acknowledged.

I've never seen grief like it. Grief like that, it's like an animal. She's not eating. She's not sleeping. She's whimpering. She's sluggish. She's not herself

The sound of his sleep, the snores and sighs and small noices, is company.

Make sure that the very different colors go next to each other so it looks deliberate. You don't want to look as if you've just run out of colour and gone for the next nearest thing.