Home > Author > Joshilyn Jackson
1 " God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Gods in Alabama
2 " ...nothing helps a lie float like a hopeful listener. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , The Opposite of Everyone
3 " 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. "
4 " 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. "
5 " People sin, Lena. People in love sin a lot. God invented sex. He knows how it works "
6 " ...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. "
7 " Oh, honey,” she said, her tone echoing Wattie’s. “I’m not sick. I’m only dying. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , The Almost Sisters
8 " 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. "
9 " The wold was full of us, the leftovers and the leavers, the bereaved and the broken. "
10 " There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. "
11 " I hoped she wouldn’t realize how spectacular she was until she was twenty-five and safely past letting it ruin her. "
12 " She spoke with all the authority vested in her by her flea-market prayer beads and her lotus-flower tramp stamp. "
13 " 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 , Backseat Saints
14 " oh that's right, you never lie unless your mouth is open and words are coming out of it "
15 " 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 , Someone Else's Love Story
16 " 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. "
17 " It's a thing I am, not a thing I do. I can't stop being it. "
― Joshilyn Jackson
18 " 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. "
19 " 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. You gotta plant more zinnias. "
20 " The things that happen to me just make me more me. "
