Jimmy Cajoleas > Quotes

“These records made a space for what was wrong with me. They took all my bad feelings and sang them until they were beautiful.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, The Good Demon

“Maybe I didn’t know how to love someone. Not yet, anyhow. Maybe love’s not something you’re born knowing, it’s something you have to learn. It’s something I wanted to learn. I didn’t want to keep hurting people like I had, to keep being hurt all the time. It was too much. Something had to change, something permanent. There was no other choice. Not if all this evil was going to end. Not if life would ever get to be better for any of us.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, The Good Demon

“It don’t go the way you think it should, but it goes alright.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, The Good Demon

“There's a fortune to be made off of God, no two ways about it. Preachers have the keys to heaven. They can bind and loose, lock and unlock. Awful lot of power preachers have.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, Goldeline

“...Not many people care much about the past. We don’t get folks your age in here. It’s either the elderly, or parents come in with their hollering little devil kids. Feel more like a social worker than a librarian most days. But that’s life, ain’t it?”
“I guess so.”
“Sure it is. You’ll find out soon enough,” she said. “It don’t go the way you think it should, but it goes alright. I’ll be up front if you need anything.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, The Good Demon

“This is how you do magic, I realize. You read the stories in everything. You speak the stories of the world.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, Goldeline

“Real life is too big and weird and confusing for something so simple as making sense.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, The Rambling

“I don't think stories are good or bad in themselves. It's like the way the Preacher uses the Book--and all the strange and confusing and lovely things in it--for evil, when its stories can be used just as easy for good.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, Goldeline

“It isn't just the drawing," she said. "Anybody can draw a star in the dirt with a stick. It's what you put into it, what comes through you and into the stick. . . . It's the same with songs. It's not the words, but how you sing them. That's why I taught you the nothingsong. It's the most powerful of all because there aren't any words. It's about whatever your heart makes it be about.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, Goldeline

“Tommy, still sleeping, grabs hold of my foot and kisses it once softly. My heart clenches in my chest. I don't know. It almost makes me want to stay.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, Goldeline: A Dark and Wondrous Fairytale Adventure – A Booklist Top 10 Middle Grade Fantasy

“Have you ever looked at a painting or heard a song or just been somewhere beautiful--maybe an old creaky house or a sunlit field or in front of a wild oak tree, just as the moon was rising--and felt like, yes, this is me this is me exactly, I could be looking in a mirror of my dreams? Have you ever felt anything like that at all in your life? If not, well, take it from old Buddy here--you ain't been looking hard enough. It's out there for you, the feeling of recognizing yourself in something else, and when you find it, oh it will feel so good deep inside of you. It'll change you forever.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, The Rambling

“You know how the best stories are all about the Rambling Duke, or the Mountebank, or any old adventurer who takes off down the Wayward River?"

"Yeah," I said. "So?"

"There are other stories, Buddy," she said. "Of folks who maybe aren't quite so free, who can't just pack up and run after any adventure that comes their way. Their stories might not seem as exciting, and they might take place somewhere regular and boring. But that doesn't mean these folks haven't sacrificed and loved and lost and fought battles just as hard as someone out on the road. It doesn't make their stories any less powerful, important, or real. It doesn't make their stories mean any less.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, The Rambling

“The nice thing about a book in a different language is that you can make it say whatever you want. The words are just pictures for your own words and all of a sudden the book is your book, it's your story that you're reading. That's how it is with all books, really, when you get down to it.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, Goldeline

“Maybe sometimes the story is more about the teller, and the hearer too, than ever it is about the story itself.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, Goldeline

“Hanging on one of the walls is a wanted poster, one of me and Tommy, our faces in black ink with WANTED printed in huge letters up top. I don't know, it makes me feel good seeing it. I can't explain why. Maybe something left over of Gruff in me, something that is a little proud to be on a poster, to have folks out searching for me. To be a wanted woman, a real bandit. If I didn't think they'd get mad, I would roll it up and keep it for myself.”
― Jimmy Cajoleas, Goldeline