Quotes from Tayari Jones

Memory is a queer creature, an eccentric curator

time is the quintessential mother.

She was no bigger than a minute,

The next customer in line was a white woman who had purchased a set of baby's pajamas for her pregnant sister. "Men," the customer said. "Who can understand the way their minds work?" Mother knew what the lady was talking about, but she couldn't laugh at a black man with her, even though she was only laughing at him for being a man.

sometime when you like where you end up, you don't care how you got there.

The magic that came from lips could be as cruel as children and as erratic as a rubber ball ricocheting off concrete.

But I lived in a world where you could never want what you wanted out in the open.

Go on to sleep. Like they say, weeping endures for a night." "But joy comes in the morning,

You can never know another person's mind; this is one thing I have learned.

Marriage is complicated.

kin is the circle you create, hands held tight.

What was real was the dance of light in her eyes and the quick current of our blood.

when a woman shuts you out, picking the lock won't let you back in.

I made note of everything about her that I didn't admire. I ignored the devotion that she wore like a cape, I paid no heed of her strength or hardworking beauty. I sat there thinking. of all I didn't love about her, to angry to even say good-bye.

and I wondered what it felt like to live inside such disloyal skin.

it's rewarding to give a pretty brown doll to a pretty brown girl and watch her squeeze and kiss it. It's different from watching a collector take it away in a wooden crate.

However much it hurts you, remember that I am the one it happened to. I am the one who was pregnant. I'm the one who isn't pregnant anymore. Whatever you feel, think about what I must feel. Just like you can say I don't know what it is like to be in prison, you don't know what it's like to go to a clinic and sign your name in a book.

None of this proposing via billboard or at halftime at the Rose Bowl. Marriage is between two people. There is no studio audience.

I mourned as though I had miscarried. My body apparently was fertile soil, but my life was not.

Maybe that's what innocence is, having no way to predict the pain of the future. When something happens that eclipses the imaginable, it changes a person.

Did I imagine that this was our pattern for all time? That we could grow old together, accusing and forgiving? Back then, I dind't know what forever looked like. Maybe I don't even know now. But that night in Piney Woods, I believed that our marriage was a fine-spun tapestry, fragile but fixable. We tore it often and mended it, always with a silken thread, lovely but sure to give way.

You also have to work with the love you are given, with all of the complications clanging behind it like tin cans to a bridal sedan.

Water always finds its own level.

Ours was a love story, the kind that's not supposed to happen to black girls anymore. This was vintage romance made scarce after Dr. King, along with Negro-owned dress shops, drugstores, and cafeterias.