Quotes from Tayari Jones

home isn't where you land; home is where you launch. You can't pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.

There should be a word, I thought, for this experience when you're surprised but at the same time the moment feels completely inevitable.

Black and alive is always a good start.

If you're a grown women and have more than ten dollars in the bank, nobody understands why you can't have a baby.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who leave home, and those who don't. I'm a proud member of the first category.

Our daughter needs to know things, she needs to know how fortunate she is. When I was her age . . .' My mother cut him off. 'Stop it, Franklin. This is how progress works. You have it better than your daddy and I have it better than mine.

How can you explain to a woman that you want to fuck her like a human being?

You can never know another person's mind;

I did wonder what was going on inside my body, but I won't say what I hoped for. Is motherhood really optional when you're a perfectly normal woman married to a perfectly normal man?

The dead end was considered a plus because we could play in the road without getting run over. Sometimes I envy the children today with all their tae kwon do, psychotherapy, and language immersion, but at the same time, I appreciate that back then being little meant you really didn't have to do anything but stay alive and have fun.

Still, the truth is that there was nothing extra. If my childhood were a sandwich, there would be no meat hanging off the bread. We had what we needed and nothing more. "And nothing less,

You cannot let this destroy you," he said. Finally Gloria showed up and gave me one of those "nerve pills" that all mothers stash in their pocketbooks. Long story short: I slept it off, whatever possessed me. I recovered and went to my opening at the Hammonds House the next day.

When a man wails like that you know it's all the tears that he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointment to teenage heartbreak, all the way to whatever injured his spirit just last year.

The only thing that gave him away as a man on trial, rather than as a man on his way to work, were his poor fingers. He'd chewed his nails down to the soft meat and started in on his cuticles. Sweet Roy. The only thing my good man ever hurt were his own hands.

all I had were words, which are as light and flimsy as air.

Abandonment doesn't have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It's like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body.

There is nothing like a Puerto Rican grandmother.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh." And I did. At first, I was driven by an urge to be polite, to humor an old man, but something in my chest lubricated and I cackled like a crazy person the way you let loose when you suspect that God isn't laughing with you but laughing at you.

You got to work with the god you were given.

I don't mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn't a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated.

My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.

I take mentoring very seriously and as a result I hardly get any work done during the school year.

I am always urging my students to honor their writing practice, to set up a schedule.

I think the NAACP isn't recognized enough for all of the work it does, especially in the field of law. They may have faded from view over the last couple of decades, but they are fighting the good fight.