Quotes from Joshilyn Jackson

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.

nothing helps a lie float like a hopeful listener.

Miracle is another word for magic, and magic is only science, unexplained.

It was more like when I was little and used to run everywhere for the sheer fun of fast moving.

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.

In families, he realized, children are added to, not superseded. The addition of a child is not a betrayal of previous or current children.

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.

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.

I'd have to run away to New York and be a hooker and eat a pound of heroin and die.

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

Well-spoken white people from prominent families came out on top in our broken court system. It wasn't fair, but it was true.

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.

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.

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.

God gives us tears so other know when we need help." from the book Gods in Alabama

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lavender and I have been living in a house of cards, while Smiley Daddy took us to Greece. He

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.

Young men, romantics, call it love at first sight, but even then I understood it was only prettiness. 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.

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.

It was love, though. Love, or some other, nameless feeling that was sister to it. I was racked with it. It thundered through me, shook my frame... This, I thought. This is how supervillains start.