Quotes from Joshilyn Jackson

He'd been doing crap like this for me since we were both five, the outsiders at a milk-white elementary school in a so-white-it-was-practically-Wonder-Bread county. I was the only half-a-Jew for miles, and Walcott was the sperm-donated product of a pair of lesbians who left Atlanta to grow organic veggies and run a mountain bed-and-breakfast

This was another pretend, and here in a yard on a bench was his real wife, with sad, kind, tired eyes. The lesson of Mimmy and my dad was not for me. It was for her. It was for them. I was so sick with understanding that I was practically yelling at her.

My plan was to go on my run, grab Ms. Fancy, drive like a cocaine-attled hell bat to the airport and hurl her and her bags out as I slowed down in the drop off lane.

Then he did the thing I couldn't manage. The kid leaned in and hugged me. A real hug, committed. I stiffened up—I couldn't help it—but he was clearly a dog person, so I didn't pull away.

You don't see it, but next happens anyway and always. With or without you.

We were so careful with each other. We had to be. We touched softly in deference to all the ways that we were wounded, working around each other's bruises and ruined places.

William knows that science and magic are the same thing; magic is only science that hasn't been explained yet.

She never told me to be any different, the jagged scrape of a thousand guilt and fury slivers rasping on my bones became background music, an ever-present hum.

She's stepped right in and owned me, and yet, it does not feel like surrender. There is choice inside surrender. This is something much more basic.

A whole slew of them lived outside Immita on a big piece of trailer-dotted land everyone called Ducktown, and they were all cousins and brothers and aunts with one another so many times over that it was hard to tell who was exactly related and how. Growing up, I'd had six or so in school right around my grade, but I was a sophomore now, and only one was left. Either the rest had failed so many times I'd left them behind by middle school or they had plain dropped out. OMG

She was exactly like her house, expensive and elegant, but not at all comfortable.

He had lost his child; he knew how fast things could spin out of control. He knew a person could lose anything in half a heartbeat.

sex was where laurel knew she knew him, and talking was the way she called him to her.

She'd only set my mouth, giving me her taste for called saints, good books, and angry men.

Pee-poo are like dis, Rachel had told me once, putting the peachy-pink Crayola that used to be called Flesh into my hand. As if all the flesh that mattered was that color. That crayon was called Peach now, but the ideas behind its old name were still alive and present. Present everywhere, all across the country, but more overt in Birchville. I wouldn't raise Digby

In fight or flight Kai has always chose for us, and my mother is made out of wings. I don't think I am like her, not in this way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

THERE ARE GODS in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.

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.