Quotes from Jackie Kay

I've started to feel very odd within my own life. It's most peculiar to feel lonely inside your own life.

I think I'll get a nut roast. Maybe a nut roast is too lesbian?

The sound of his sleep, the snores and sighs and small noices, is company.

She was in love. There was no turning back.

During this period I feel as if some part of myself has been banished to another part of the world.I feel as if I cannot live my life to the full and feel everything I'm capable of feeling unless I have this love. The pleasure goes from me; the delight goes. Nothing means anything.

The road that was in your head Has already found you walking: When you looked up ahead, It was your footsteps waiting. - The Imaginary Road

I am lying to myself. I am always lying to myself and I really must stop it. I am alone. My friends don't know how to talk to me or write to me any more

You cannot penalize a man for one slip. Then she lay wondering about the word slip. When you slip, you fall, but maybe it is not such a sore fall because you have slipped.

Make sure that the very different colors go next to each other so it looks deliberate. You don't want to look as if you've just run out of colour and gone for the next nearest thing.

I've never seen grief like it. Grief like that, it's like an animal. She's not eating. She's not sleeping. She's whimpering. She's sluggish. She's not herself

Nick Makoha's Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree Press) is a bold and brilliant poetry debut that does not avert its gaze from trauma and atrocity (exploring along the way the brutal rule of Idi Amin and the civil war) and yet is light on its feet and fills you with hope. The Guardian

Poetry in here keeps the conversation open between the living and the dead, the misunderstood and the wise, the imprisoned and the free. Koestler Voices Vol. 3

I remember watching my grandmother build her fire, the honest kindling, the twisted newspaper, the tiny tower of good black coal. And how, once lit, she'd hold a sheet of newspaper across the fire and say, 'watch it suck, dear'. - An Old Woman's Fire

Do things in your own time. Everybody should like how they choose. We never know what goes behind the blinds.

Animals are luckier; they can bury their heads in sand, hide under their coats, pretend to have no head at all.

Life, he told me, was like a fork of lightning. He could see exactly where one decision violently parted company with another and a new future flared up before him.

We're not alive to be alone on the planet. We're alive to share, to eat together and love together and laugh together and cry together. If you can never love because you will always lose, what reason is there to live?

Poetry is in rude health. People are turning to it more and more to try and make sense of the world we are living in. In these particular times, poetry finds its place" Wise words from

She was a contradiction like that, you know. The things she wrote down were warmer than her, in person. That sounds like she's dead, he thought. Well, in a way, she is, you know, in a way she is dead. — 'How To Get Away With Suicide