Joshilyn Jackson Quotes

The things that happen to me just make me more me.

...nothing helps a lie float like a hopeful listener.

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.

In families, he realized, children are added to, not superseded.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

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

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.

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

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

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.

When things went to shit, girls called their mothers

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

She had shown Laura that David was less hers than she had ever thought and the pieces of him she did own were being taken.

You go to bed, too, and don't fret, hear me? Things feel hard now, but it will pass. Everything passes, and something new comes along to fill the space.' As she spoke, her tone shifted. She wasn't talking about me anymore. 'You can't go around holding the worst thing you ever did in your hand, staring at it. You gotta cook supper, put gas in the car.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

He threw up his hands and said, "And you know I fucking love you. So?"
I looked into his right eye, then his left, back and forth.
"Why do you love me?"
I knew what I wanted, but on his side, I didn't want it to be because I could be so bad for him. I didn't want to be a pretty fist that he could bang himself into. I leaned against the wall, my head right by the keypad. "If we're going to take a run at this, it has to be more than good sex and your masochism."
I wasn't sure he was going to answer. I wasn't sure he had a reason, and he could be so hard to read. But then he smiled.
"Because everyone on this shithole planet says a lot of pretty words to make themselves look good while they do awful things", he said. "You're the opposite."
It was a good answer. A good thing to say. I peered from one eye to the other, back and forth, harder than I had looked into Clark's eyes or the gun's. Birdwine's left one was rimmed in black and violet, still swollen. I watched his pupils expand as I leaned up. There was a fair amount of crazy present, sure, but in the darkness of his eyes I saw myself reflected clearly. I was real to him. He saw me all the way down to the bottom and knew every awful thing I'd done. More - he knew all that I was capable of doing, and yet, he looked at me like I was something worthy and good.
"Come upstairs," I said. There was a promise in the words that spoke to more than sex. I thought it was implicit. But he only waited, si

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hail to thee Alabama, you verdant trollop.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

In fight or flight Kai has always chose for us, and my mother is made out of wings. I don't think I am like her, not in this way.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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