Jackie Kay > Quotes

“When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.”
― Jackie Kay, Trumpet

“Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence. A strong presence right next to me. I look at it. It doesn't look like anything, that's what is so strange. It just fits in.”
― Jackie Kay, Trumpet

“My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That's what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation.”
― Jackie Kay, Trumpet

“She walked on and on as though if she walked far enough she might walk this thing out of her. As if by walking long enough, hard enough, she might forget.”
― Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here

“It's as if my footprints were already on the road before I even got there.I walk into them, my waiting footprints.”
― jackie kay

“When it rains like that, dark in the afternoon, you feel like you've been taken into the past.”
― Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here

“Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence.”
― Jackie Kay, Trumpet

“Weather here in this part of the world is just as moody, just as subjective and disloyal, as people.”
― Jackie Kay, Trumpet

“I didn't feel like I was missing anything. Nor did I feel ambitious any more. It all seemed stupid wanting to be better than the others in the same ring, shallow, pointless.”
― Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here

“I know I am capable of loving to the full capacity, of not being frightened of loving too much, of giving myself up and over”
― Jackie Kay, Trumpet

“How bizarre, i think to myself, to be on a train and to actually not want to arrive anywhere? What kind of madness is that?”
― Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here

“Some men fall in love with a woman,
Some women fall in love with a man,
Some men fall in love with another man,
Some women fall in love with another woman -
But I, my dear one, fell in love with Shetland.

- Shetland”
― Jackie Kay, Red, Cherry Red

“The tall trees, compassionate, understood everything:
grief - they stood stock-still, branches drooped in despair;
fear - they exposed their many roots, tugged their gold hair;
anger - they shook in the storm, pointed their bony fingers.

- The World of Trees (inspired by the Forest of Burnley)”
― Jackie Kay, Red, Cherry Red

“Time feels as if it is on the other side of me now, way over, out across the sea, like another country. I don’t live inside it any more and it doesn’t rule me.”
― Jackie Kay, Trumpet

“More than anything else, more than your body, or the food you eat, you are your teeth. Life is a journey from milk teeth to false teeth with fillings and crowns thrown in in between for relief.”
― Jackie Kay, Trumpet

“They never tell you about that either. How the hardest thing a mother has to do is give her child up, let them go, watch them run.”
― Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here

“The terrible thing about pain is that it doesn't matter, it still hurts. It hurts like hell.”
― Jackie Kay, Trumpet

“The beautiful have so much easier a time of it than the ugly, don't you think? They get smiled at the whole time. Strangers offer them things. People notice the beautiful; the beautiful are constantly acknowledged.”
― Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here

“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”
― Jackie Kay, Trumpet

“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”
― Jackie Kay, Bantam

“You noticed things. You're not sure when you start. It's only when you've noticed - noticed that you know you've noticed. Maybe between the first time when you're staring to think, Is this what I think it is? and the second time when you think, Yes, between those two times, there's a silence. A pause.”
― Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here

“I've started to feel very odd within my own life. It's most peculiar to feel lonely inside your own life.”
― Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here

“The heat comes off the music.”
― Jackie Kay, Trumpet

“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?”
― Jackie Kay, Reality, Reality

“My mum all those years ago sensed a child who had been adopted was also a child who could feel terribly hurt. And no matter how much she loved me, no matter how much my dad loved me, there is still a windy place right at the core of my heart. The windy place is like Wuthering Heights, out on open moors, rugged and wild and free and lonely. The wind rages and batters at the trees. I struggle against the windy place. I sometimes even forget it. But there it is. I am partly defeated by it. You think adoption is a story which has an end. But the point about it is that it has no end. It keeps changing its ending.”
― Jackie Kay, Red Dust Road

“The sound of his sleep, the snores and sighs and small noices, is company.”
― Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here

“I think I'll get a nut roast. Maybe a nut roast is too lesbian?”
― Jackie Kay, Reality, Reality

“Life is too short to argue about time.”
― Jackie Kay, Reality, Reality

“Writers give readers courage – the courage to be utterly your complete and complex self.

(In reference to Audre Lorde)”
― Jackie Kay

“She was in love. There was no turning back.”
― Jackie Kay