Joy Jordan-Lake > Quotes

“A life worth living is one of compassion. And a life of compassion will include many tears.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

“You've had a tough crack at life, I'll give you that. But you don't got to let the bad thrown at you become the ugly you think you got to be.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Blue Hole Back Home

“This is a work of fiction, which, contrary to what any reader paying attention to recent events might assume, I began writing more than twenty years before its publication. It has been a most unusual journey. Before I tell—briefly—the story behind this novel and the remarkable people who inspired it, let me add that while this novel does feature some real people, places, and pivotal events, they are handled in a fictional manner. My intent is not only to tell a story worth reading but equally—or, to be honest, more importantly—to honor the memory of those in nineteenth- and twenty-first-century Charleston who have set an example of courage, conviction, and a spirit of love far stronger than”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

“You make sure you do something good with your life, you hear? Something that puts more beauty and more kindness into the world. And be a person of courage, my Kate. With a tender heart but a lot tougher hide.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

“Now all white Southern women keep as a weapon against uncouth world a certain smile that can be whipped out of storage and tacked up, in an instant, covering over a multitude of too-candid moments. My mother's face, whose upturned mouth never moved, registered confusion, then fear-then landed where I expected that steely doggedly cheerful resolve of a smile.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Blue Hole Back Home

“It’s part of the role mountains play in our lives. To make us feel small. Humbled.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“There's a beauty, and there's a strength, you know, that grows only in a long walk together in the same direction.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

“But Kerry allowed her first thought, bitter as ginger root, to go where most first thoughts should go: unsaid. Skimmed off to leave something kinder beneath.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“Some days, and this was one, she felt as if bitterness were turning her insides to something like pine knots and sparks, just seconds away from exploding.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“Bunch a buildings that outgrowed the sky.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“Speak less than thou knowest.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“Funny how much I’ve read about this place for months—pages and pages of history. And no idea how little I knew until I came for myself.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

“cry.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“Britches,” John Cabot murmured. To Vanderbilt, he said in a low voice, “It’s fascinating—the connections of their speech with Elizabethan England, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as Africa, significantly. Their speech, the construction of their homes, their methods of farming, their musical instruments, all of it hardly evolved from earlier eras across oceans. Like a time capsule here in the hollows of the Blue Ridge.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“The twins didn’t need to be infected with her resentment. Because resentment, she knew, once under the skin, festers. And spreads.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“Here were the pained and hopeful voices of people who knew despair was life and life was despair—and grace was there for the taking.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“Maybe, she thought, grown-up life was not so much finding your perfect place in the world, but aching for all the faraway places and people you loved—and learning to look at right where you are now, as Rema would say, through a long eyepiece of grateful.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” —Jackie Robinson”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

“Whereas books, once read, become fully a part of us.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“others”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“that whole skinny tree of him with a mandolin caught in its branches,”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Echoes of Us

“All the little sea otters hold hands as they float and let seaweed twine them in tight, while small marine turtles fold front flippers up and dream sweet turtle dreams through the night.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, All the Little Animals: A Bedtime Book from A-Z

“From the narrow two-story shop, smoke curled out a crooked brick chimney, its mortar mostly crumbled away—as if it had stood leaning forward to watch the invasions and victory marches and funeral processions of two, maybe three hundred years.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

“But Rose lifted her champagne flute in a toast. “It is precisely our unfortunate characteristics that make any of us interesting—wouldn’t you say, ladies? Those of us, I might add, who are interesting.” Maneuvering Kate away from the gaggle, Rose led her through the gardens and down to the river.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

“Sometimes I do slip and say what I mean, instead of what ought to be said.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

“Stubbornness is one of my few virtues.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

“up of feeling as the next man, including a brute of”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy

“If the meek could inherit the earth, maybe the kind could capture the truth.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“Reckon none of us live past thirteen without something we wish we’d lived better.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, Under a Gilded Moon

“All the little animals under the sun, in the wild, and in every zoo are yawning and nuzzling and snuggling and huddling, getting ready for sleep, just like you.”
― Joy Jordan-Lake, All the Little Animals: A Bedtime Book from A-Z