Quotes from Joshilyn Jackson

William knows that science and magic are the same thing; magic is only science that hasn't been explained yet. Tonight he has made chemistry into magic for her.

Parenthood shouldn't work this way. Fathers shouldn't get to decide if they wanted to father or not, thirteen years in. Fathers who weren't dead should do their damn job.

I wanted to show up. I wanted you to know, I will show up.

Hail to thee Alabama, you verdant trollop.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

blind and naked as an unearthed mole, uncomprehending.

People sin, Lena. People in love sin a lot. God invented sex. He knows how it works

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.

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.

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.

I'd only wanted, desperately, for him to be a thing that I could have.

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.

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.

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.

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

I hoped she wouldn't realize how spectacular she was until she was twenty-five and safely past letting it ruin her.

That was normal. That was regular and real.. It didn't look like a place [she] could get to from here.

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.

You don't see it, but next happens anyway and always. With or without you." "No

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.