Home > Author > Joshilyn Jackson
61 " Her expression is blank and demure, but this girl and I, we have the same shape mouth. I recognize the way she’s set it, like she’s got a ball of mutiny in there, and she is rolling it around to get a thorough taste. She’s not half as placid as she looks. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , The Opposite of Everyone
62 " Young men see pretty, and they start hanging all the things they hope you’ll be onto you till you’re so weighed down you can’t move. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Backseat Saints
63 " Miracle is another word for magic, and magic is only science, unexplained. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Someone Else's Love Story
64 " It was more like when I was little and used to run everywhere for the sheer fun of fast moving. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
65 " Now, I don’t think about it.” Or when I did, I mostly felt a terrible relief. Truly terrible, like a person who’s been told they no longer have to carry the weight of their own gangrenous and rotting left arm. It smells, it hurts, it’s literally killing you—but it’s still the only left arm that you’ll ever have. "
66 " In families, he realized, children are added to, not superseded. The addition of a child is not a betrayal of previous or current children. "
67 " if I’d have to convert. It would upset my parents, but at least it would upset both of them equally. Dad would feel I’d chosen a form of Christianity, and Mimmy would be equally certain that I hadn’t. "
68 " The movement was in me, but it wasn’t me. It was another little something, a someone, willfully choosing to flex his flippery future arms, or whatever it was he had by then. It was a choice, but I hadn’t made it. It was inside me, and mine, but I did not control it. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , The Almost Sisters
69 " I’d have to run away to New York and be a hooker and eat a pound of heroin and die. "
70 " William didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in Bridget’s love for God. It was a manifestation of her love of goodness, and William could believe in goodness. He saw it in her. He loved it in her. If "
71 " Well-spoken white people from prominent families came out on top in our broken court system. It wasn’t fair, but it was true. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Never Have I Ever
72 " It was an all-black Baptist church in a decent blue-collar neighborhood. Everyone at that church was so familiar. It was like visiting home. Sure, I got odd looks the first time I showed up. I felt like my skin was glowing with an incandescent white otherness. I could feel the congregation peppering me with sideways glances. But I didn’t feel any malice in their gazes. Every person I met and spoke with was soon relaxed and chatting with me about the weather or their children or Jesus. I was just as easy with them. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Gods in Alabama
73 " She was the avatar of the town as it used to be in some Old South utopia that only existed if you were white and well-to-do and Baptist and didn’t notice how folks who weren’t all of those things had fared. "
74 " 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. "
75 " God gives us tears so other know when we need help." from the book Gods in Alabama "
76 " That’s not how families are structured. In families, he realized, children are added to, not superseded. The addition of a child is not a betrayal of previous or current children. "
77 " As time passed, events became mutable. People justified their actions, and the more shame they felt about a memory, the more they chewed it over, fretting and defending and editing, until they could live with it. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Mother May I
78 " There was no such thing as mixed-race in the South, or in America for that matter. The whole country had called a mixed-race man our “first black president. "
79 " Lavender and I have been living in a house of cards, while Smiley Daddy took us to Greece. He "
80 " It wasn’t like the news delighted her, nothing like. But I saw her get a tiny tickle in the schadenfreude as she registered that this happened on Dad’s watch. "