Quotes from Joshilyn Jackson

You walk like you own everything you see.

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.

The truth was, I would rather be Lena, his killer, than Arlene, a girl so desperate-hungry she had wanted to be his victim.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Arm in arm, Birchie and Wattie were a living hinge. They were the place where the South met itself, and I thought that it was good, even though their very sisterhood had called forth a mourning party. It was ugly, but it was where we were. This was where history had brought us, and inside me the baby I would

He was not from a place where people got only one shot or were allowed only one mistake. In his world there were infinite chances.

Arm in arm, Birchie and Wattie were a living hinge. They were the place where the South met itself, and I thought that it was good, even though their very sisterhood had called forth a mourning party. It was ugly, but it was where we were. This was where history had brought us, and inside me the baby I would not name Digby spun like a small promise of better things. He belonged to me and to both of them. He was the future that Birchie and Wattie had risked everything to preserve.

In that beauty, so vast and varied, I felt my own smallness in the wide, wild world. It let me forget myself and yet be wholly present. It let me stop trying to die. If

Hello, hello," she said, when I put him, a small stranger, into her arms. Her eyes brightened, and she smiled. My boy called her to immediate love in that way that babies have; it is their birthright. It is their superpower. She touched his open, tiny palm, his cheek, the burring of black fuzz on his head. "Hello.

They should make amends," she said. "They should face her, and confess, and try to make it right. They should go to jail and do volunteer work and show their sons they must be better. They should have to live with it, too, because I think no matter what they tell themselves, it must stay in them. A canker in them. A black place.

I kept my secrets, telling myself that they were the past. I ignored the ones that were still alive. The ones that touched every current breath, the ones I couldn't even tell myself.

It's like Paul on the road to Damascus. Here's this anal-retentive control freak who likes to run around and persecute Christians. So God knocks him down and blinds him and reams him out. So he stops persecuting Christians. But—go read him. He was still an anal-retentive control freak.

He changed his behavior, but I don't believe people can change their essential natures.

They sat quietly, both thinking of Marty Gray, and of all the bad things that can happen to young girls who are shy and good and obedient. The secret keepers. The easily led.

didn't want my life to be interesting ever, ever again, but I liked interesting on paper, contained between closable covers. I didn't mind this Roux person hijacking our decorous, mild fun. Just this once.

I'd grown up with a woman who could make a heap of stolen parts sound truer than the truth. She could shade a story I'd heard a thousand times until all at once the meaning inverted and it became its own opposite. I was her kid. I operated inside the ethics of my profession, but I could spin like nobody's business.

He was young, and he had grown up wealthy; he didn't have the context. In his head she'd faced the consequences he would have had to face. Embarrassment. An angry parent. A different, maybe less impressive school. He was not from a place where people got only one shot or were allowed only one mistake. In his world there were infinite chances.

We came up in a different time than you. Some nights these southern trees around here bore some strange fruit. You understand me? Now, I don't talk about that mess. Not with pretty little white girls whose foot never touched the earth until years after Dr. King got buried in it.

Things feel hard now, but it will pass. Everything passes, and something new comes along to fill the space." As she spoke, her tone shifted. She wasn't talking about me anymore. "You can't go around holding the worst thing you ever did in your hand, staring at it. You gotta cook supper, put gas in the car. You gotta plant more zinnias.

This physical pull between us was a mind-twister; the reconnection was immediate and strong. Now that Cam was physically here, charging the scant space between us, I realized how much energy I'd dedicated to not thinking about him. … Being without him was like visiting Denver, where the elevation wasn't enough to kill me, but every breath took work.