Home > Author > Joshilyn Jackson
41 " I wanted to show up. I wanted you to know, I will show up. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , The Almost Sisters
42 " Hail to thee Alabama, you verdant trollop. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Gods in Alabama
43 " Odd to think of myself that way, small and blind and tethered to her. In that time before memory, everything I touched was hers. I heard her voice from the inside, with no idea that she was a separate person. Back then, she had simply been the world. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , The Opposite of Everyone
44 " How stupid. My mom and dad had lost each other, and for what? So they could fit better at their parents’ tables at Christmas and Passover? So their brothers and sisters could be comfortable? The families who had worked so hard to tear them apart had gone smugly back to their own lives after it was over. I didn’t see any of my grandparents more than once a year. I got colorful birthday cards with twenty-dollar bills in them from my aunts and uncles on my birthday.Meanwhile, my parents spent their lives so lonely. Dad wandered, seeking home in a mistress’s Mimmy-canted face. Mimmy waited, her lamp trimmed, for a day that never came.Meanwhile, all they’d ever wanted was alive inside the other. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Someone Else's Love Story
45 " A whole and grown-up person would go and simply tell him. I’m in love with you. A whole and grown-up person would ask him. Can you please love me back? "
46 " 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. "
47 " It’s one thing to decide what you want. It’s quite another to know how to get it. William doesn’t know how, but he is trying. "
48 " 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. "
49 " ...blind and naked as an unearthed mole, uncomprehending. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Backseat Saints
50 " 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. "
51 " 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. "
52 " The South was like that optical-illusion drawing of the duck that is at the same time a rabbit. I’d always see the duck first, his round eye cheery and his bill seeming to smile. But if I shifted my gaze, the duck’s bill morphed into flattened, worried ears. The cheery eye, reversed, held fear, and I could see only a solemn rabbit. The Souths were like that drawing. Both existed themselves, but they were so merged that I could shift from one and find myself inside the other without moving. "
53 " 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. "
54 " People say, I don’t know how she lives with herself, but every single one of them was living with their own worst thing, just fine. No one walks around holding their ugliest sin in the palm of their hand, staring at it. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Never Have I Ever
55 " I’d only wanted, desperately, for him to be a thing that I could have. "
56 " 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. "
57 " The playground song in my head went, First comes love, then comes hideous betrayal, then comes endless regret requiring expensive therapy. It was a terrible song. It didn’t even rhyme. But it was mine, and I hadn’t made a family, even though I’d wanted one "
58 " That was normal. That was regular and real.. It didn't look like a place [she] could get to from here. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
59 " 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. "
60 " You don’t see it, but next happens anyway and always. With or without you.” “No, "