Quotes from Tayari Jones

Gloria once told me that your best quality is also your worst.

Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasionally this is in service of the good.

I thought of Walter again. "Six or twelve," he sometimes said when he was depressed, which wasn't all the time but often enough that I recognized a blue mood when it was settling in. "That's your fate as a black man. Carried by six or judged by twelve.

When I was mad, I didn't raise my voice. Instead, I lowered it to a register that you heard with your bones, not your ears.

People say, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you, doesn't kill you.

Everything I do is a love letter addressed to you.

And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.

If you lose it every time he tries to come clean, you're encouraging him to lie.

Yesterday I sat under the hickory tree in the front yard. It's the only place where I find rest and just feel fine. I know fine isn't a lot, but it's rare for me these days. Even when I'm happy, there is something in between me and whatever good news comes my way. It's like eating a butterscotch still sealed in the wrapper.

But 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.

Break your own heart, or they will break it for you.

I knew by then that I would never have my mother back, not in the way I had known her all my life. When you have seen your mother shattered, there's no putting her back together. There will always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she will never be stronger than a cracked plate.

Human emotion is beyond comprehension, smooth and uninterrupted, like an orb made of blown glass.

Looking back on it, it's like watching a horror flick and wondering why the characters are so determined to ignore the danger signs. When a spectral voice says, GET OUT, you should do it. But in real life, you don't know that you're in a scary movie. You think your wife is being overly emotional. You quietly hope it's because she's pregnant, because a baby is what you need to lock this thing in and throw away the key.

When a spectral voice says, get out, you should do it. But in real life, you don't know that you're in a scary movie.

One of the hurdles of adulthood is when holidays become measuring sticks againt which you always fall short. For children, Thanksgiving is about turkey and Christmas is about presents. Grown up, you learn that all holidays are about family and few can win there.

We sat at that table, neither able to comfort the other, her remembering being a bystander to my mother's suffering and me suffering because I was denied the experience.

He's your father, but first he is a man. A man is just a man, and that's all we have to wok with.

In so many ways, you can't choose what you give to your daughter, you just give her what you have.

I am neither religious nor superstitious, but there is something otherworldly about the space where two roads come together. The devil is said to set up shop there if you want to swap your soul for something more useful. If you believe that God can be bribed, it's also the hallowed ground to make sacrifices. In the literal sense, it's also a place to change direction, but once you've changed it, you're stuck until you come to another crossroads, and who knows how long that will be.

I don't believe that blood makes a family; kin is the circle you create, hands held tight. There is something to shared genetics, but the question is, what exactly is that something?

Silver" is what I called girls who were natural beauties but who also smoothed on a layer of pretty from a jar. It wasn't just how they looked, it was how they were. The name came from a song my mother sang sometimes when she was getting dressed to go out somewhere special. She sang along with Aretha Franklin at the end: "Sail on, silver girl… Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way.

Maybe that's what innocence is, having no way to predict the pain of the future.

I guess this is how love is when it comes undone. No matter how tight you knit the stitches, a sharp tug on a loose thread will transform your warm sweater into a mangled heap of yarn that you can't reuse or repair.