Tayari Jones Quotes

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

Sometimes it's exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I've lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn't kill me then and will not kill me now. But this what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn't simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it's gone, nothing is whole again.

You also have to work with the love you are given, with all of the complications clanging behind it like tin cans to a bridal sedan.

I made note of everything about her that I didn't admire. I ignored the devotion that she wore like a cape, I paid no heed of her strength or hardworking beauty. I sat there thinking. of all I didn't love about her, to angry to even say good-bye.

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

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.

I know you're innocent, there is not one doubt in my mind, but I also know that you're not here.

Marriage is like grafting a limb onto a tree trunk. You have the limb, freshly sliced, dripping sap, and smelling of springtime, and then you have the mother tree stripped of her protective bark, gouged and ready to receive this new addition. Some years ago, my father performed this surgery on a dogwood tree in the side yard. He tried a pink-blooming limb stolen from the woods to my mother's white-blooming tree from a nursery lot. It took yards of burlap and twine and two years for the plants to join. Even now, all these years later, there's something not quite natural about the tree, even in its amazing two-tone glory.

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.

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.

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

But who listens to the wisdom of jewelry? Only our bodies know the truth. Bones don't lie.

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

I know who I married, too. You're in me. When I touch you, your flesh communicates with my bones.

I've likely rolled with punches when I should have hit back," she said. "But I rolled my way into a life I love.

As for me, I'm modern and traditional at the same time. I, too, believe in intimacy - who doesn't? But I also believe in commitment. Marriage is, as she says, "a peculiar institution." My parents' divorce made it clear what kinds of raw deals are brokered at the altar. But right now, in America, marriage is the closest thing to what I want.

The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.

I didn't want a fresh start, but maybe a little breathing room would be nice.

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.

There are too many loose ends in the world in need of knots.

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

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?

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.

A marriage is more than your heart, it's your life. And we are not sharing ours.

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.

A woman doesn't always have a choice, not in a meaningful way. Sometimes there is a debt that must be paid, a comfort that she is obliged to provide, a safe passage that must be secured. Everyone of us has lain down for a reason that was not love.

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.

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.

When I was growing up, Grandmamma used to say, "The Lord works in mysterious ways" or "He might not be there when you want Him, but He's always right on time." Evie used to say, "God will do to you what He feels like needs to be done to you." Then Grandmamma would tell Evie to hush and remind her that getting left by a man was not the worst thing that ever happened to somebody. And Evie would say, "It's the worst thing that ever happened to me." She said it so much that she came down with lupus. "God wanted me to see what misery really was," Evie said. I didn't like all this God talk, like He was up there toying with us. I preferred more of the tenderness and acceptance my grandmother promised in her hymns. I told this to Evie when I was a little boy and she said, "You got to work with the god you were given

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.

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

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.

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

In the private library of my spirit, there is a dictionary of words that aren't.

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.

However much it hurts you, remember that I am the one it happened to. I am the one who was pregnant. I'm the one who isn't pregnant anymore. Whatever you feel, think about what I must feel. Just like you can say I don't know what it is like to be in prison, you don't know what it's like to go to a clinic and sign your name in a book.

Did we love so forcefully that night because we knew or because we didn't? Was there an alarm from the future, a furious bell without its clapper? Did this hopeless bell manage to generate a breeze, causing me to reach to the floor to find my slip and use it to cover myself? Did some subtle warning cause Roy to turn and pin me to my side with his heavy arm? In his sleep, he mumbled something but did not wake.

But how you feel love and how you understand love are two different things

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.

Yesterday I sat under the hickory tree in the front yard. It's the only place where I find rest and just feel fine. I know fine isn't a lot, but it's rare for me these days. Even when I'm happy, there is something in between me and whatever good news comes my way. It's like eating a butterscotch still sealed in the wrapper.

Looking back on it, it's like watching a horror flick and wondering why the characters are so determined to ignore the danger signs. When a spectral voice says, GET OUT, you should do it. But in real life, you don't know that you're in a scary movie. You think your wife is being overly emotional. You quietly hope it's because she's pregnant, because a baby is what you need to lock this thing in and throw away the key.

sometime when you like where you end up, you don't care how you got there.

Life is full of things you never figured on.

In so many ways, you can't choose what you give to your daughter, you just give her what you have.

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.

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.

Isn't there something in Genesis about not looking back? A stupid glance over my shoulder showed her expression relaxing, glad I wasn't taking anything that couldn't be replaced and glad I didn't destroy anything that couldn't be repaired. "Do you care for me, Georgia?" I asked her. "Tell me you don't and I'm out of your life forever." She stood in the driveway with her arms wrapped around herself like she was freezing. "Andre is on his way."
"I didn't ask you about no Andre."
"He'll be here in a minute."
My head hurt, but I pressed her. "It's a yes-or-no question."
"Can we talk when Andre gets back? We can-"
"Stop talking about him. I want to know if you love me."
"Andre…"
She said his name one time too many. For what happened next, she would have to take some of the blame. I asked her a simple question and she refused to give me a simple answer. I turned from her and made a sharp left turn, pounding across the yard, feeling the dry grass crunch under my shoes. Six long strides put me at the base of the massive tree. I touched the rough bark, an instant of reflection, to give Old Hickey the benefit of the doubt. But in reality, a hickory tree was a useless hunk of wood. Tall, and that's all. To break the shell of a hickory nut, you needed a hammer and an act of Congress, and even then you needed a screwdriver to get at the meat, which was about as tasty as a clod of limestone. Nobody would ever mourn a hickory tree except Celestial, and m

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.

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.

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.

Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.

You don't know how demoralizing it is to be a man with nothing to offer a woman.

I'm alone in a way that's more than the fact that I am the only living person within these walls. Up until now, I thought I knew what was and wasn't possible. Maybe that's what innocence is, having no way to predict the pain of the future. When something happens that eclipses the imaginable, it changes a person. It's like the difference between a raw egg and a scrambled egg. It's the same thing, but it's not the same at all. That's the best way I can put it. I look in the mirror and I know it's me, but I can't quite recognize myself.

We sat at that table, neither able to comfort the other, her remembering being a bystander to my mother's suffering and me suffering because I was denied the experience.

Marriage is complicated.

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.

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.

When a spectral voice says, get out, you should do it. But in real life, you don't know that you're in a scary movie.

I try and calm myself, remember that I've lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn't kill me then and will not kill me now. But this is what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn't simply empty, our home has been emptied.

You say you want my advice. Here's what I have. Tell the truth. Don't try to cushion the blow. If you're bad enough to do it, you're bad enough to tell it.