Home > Author > Joshilyn Jackson
101 " 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. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Someone Else's Love Story
102 " William Ashe doesn’t believe in destiny. The word itself is actually shorthand people use when they wish to mysticize random events or externalize the results of their own willful choices. "
103 " What had he been Thinking? If a fella was looking for love, I was the wrong road to go down. I was the road, in fact, that was crawling with barbed wire and bears and dynamite, marked with huge signs that said THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU HERE. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , The Opposite of Everyone
104 " After breakfast I went back to bed, but for the longest time, I could not sleep. I stared at Clarice’s shams and prayed and prayed and prayed. I had been raised to believe that prayer could move mountains, if only you had faith the size of a mustard seed. “Mountains be damned,” I whispered to God. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Gods in Alabama
105 " After breakfast I went back to bed, but for the longest time, I could not sleep. I stared at Clarice’s shams and prayed and prayed and prayed. I had been raised to believe that prayer could move mountains, if only you had faith the size of a mustard seed. “Mountains be damned,” I whispered to God. “I need a body moved. "
106 " Maybe that’s what true love looked like, at its best. It looked like this to Julian, an adopted kid who talked to me of teams and rescues. "
107 " I had a strict No Assholes policy, and I’d never met a cheater of either sex who wasn’t some stripe of asshole underneath the He doesn’t understand mes and the We drifted aparts and the She won’t do that thing I need in beds "
108 " Tonight, I wanted to be a little more like him. I didn’t mean to blind myself to how hard and hateful the world was; sweetness was hard to find and harder still to keep. I only meant to reach for it, anyway. "
109 " Later, sitting in American History 101, I realized why I felt so at home at the church. After the industrial revolution came the great migration, as black sharecroppers traveled up to Chicago for better-paying factory jobs and a shot at a new life. But they were all southerners. They formed their own communities, and the culture survived. The people at Mrs. Burroughs’s church spoke with long liquid vowels and blurred consonants, cooked everything in lard, moved with a languorous grace that implied it was 100 degrees outside. They could have been my relatives. "
110 " THERE ARE GODS in Alabama: Jack Daniel’s, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus. "
111 " The weird go west,” I tell my dog. Anyone too strange for Berkeley must walk straight into the sea like a lemming to drown. Or possibly grow gills. If they are too odd for this city, there can be no place for them above sea level. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Backseat Saints
112 " You walk like you own everything you see. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Mother May I
113 " Hana didn’t know that I existed, much less that I was looking for her. She didn’t know that anyone was looking. Hana wasn’t like me. She was like Candace, Shar, Karice—every lost girl in the world who felt herself unvalued and unsought. She had no way to know that somewhere in the world, right now, her name was being called. "
114 " The truth was, I would rather be Lena, his killer, than Arlene, a girl so desperate-hungry she had wanted to be his victim. "
115 " But the good guy knew the monster was there. He chose to drink. He chose to let it out. He liked it. And I doubt he quit liking it. "
116 " Forgiving him was like balm on an old hurt place, and it felt sweeter than his apology. Sweeter even than the moment I’d said all the things I’d held in my mouth for twenty angry years. Forgiving him felt like relief. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , The Almost Sisters
117 " Her father evicts Vina from her body when he makes her body a bad place to be. He is killing Vina in those minutes, and he believes he has this right. Emily Birch is now deep inside the Second South. Her family helped make it, and her father has maintained it. He is it, and she is him. "
118 " We were grown-up women, so we packed our worsts away in hidden boxes. We were mothers, so we sank those boxes under jobs and mortgages and meal plans. Mothers have to sink those boxes deep. "
― Joshilyn Jackson , Never Have I Ever
119 " No one here talks like me or gets my references or knows the songs I know. I don’t look like any of them. Even my bond with Joya was based on not belonging here. "
120 " This is what Liza knows: People go under. They fall off the world, they go beneath and drown and die. Sometimes nothing saves you. But fuck it, she’s still here. She is a living thing, with twelve pins now pressed into the tree-house oak in the backyard and a thirteenth coming "
― Joshilyn Jackson , A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty