Joshilyn Jackson > Quotes

“God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

“There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

“I had been born and mostly raised in the South, so I ought to have been able to find a way to reach him. Southern girls are trained from birth up that the way to a man's heart is never through the front door. They may leave a basket of cookies there, and while he's busy picking them up, they're squirming in through a back window.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

“It's a thing I am, not a thing I do. I can't stop being it.”
― Joshilyn Jackson

“This is what Liza knows: People go under. They fall off the world, they go beneath and drown and die. Sometimes, nothing saves you…Liza knows how black the world is, how fast it spins, and how you have to take the taste of apples and the smell of your little girl’s orange zest shampoo where you find them. You have to hold these things and strive, always, for one more word and one more step. You push forward and you fight, for as long as ever you can, until the black world spins and the moon pulls the tide and the water rises up and takes you.”
― Joshilyn Jackson

“No one walks around holding their ugliest sin in the palm of their hand, staring at it. Our hurts are heavy, and we let them sink. Every day they drift lower, settling in murky places where the light can’t reach.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Never Have I Ever

“The things that happen to me just make me more me.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

“You can’t go around holding the worst thing you ever did in your hand, staring at it. You gotta cook supper, put gas in the car. You gotta plant more zinnias.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Almost Sisters

“Sometimes karma takes years to pay a person back, but that day, it had a fast backhand return...”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Someone Else's Love Story

“The wold was full of us, the leftovers and the leavers, the bereaved and the broken.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“I had spent my whole life hungry for forgiveness. It had not come, so I didn’t know firsthand what he was feeling. But I had imagined it, over and over. I’d wanted it so bad. I’d wanted Kai—or anyone, anyone who knew the worst in me—to say that I was still dear, and good, and worthy.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“Hail to thee, Alabama, thou verdant trollop!”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

“I would take today's joy, and tomorrow's. I would take it with both hands, anywhere it came.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

“I was looking for my ex-lover to break the Sixth Commandment.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Backseat Saints

“He knows me so well. I don’t have to say it. Not any of it. Not yet. There will be time for it later. For now, it is enough. It is enough and it is easy. Easy to walk the last few steps between us. Easy and so beautiful to step into his arms.

He kisses me. He kisses me.

I kiss him back.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Someone Else's Love Story

“I want to thank you, first, Person Who Bought This Book. Because of you, I have a job I love. Because of you, the people in my head get to live outside of it. When I meet you, you talk about my characters as if they are old friends (or enemies) we have in common; I cannot explain how miraculous this feels. If you are one of those people who have put my books into the hands of other readers—either professionally as a god-called lunatic who loves books so much you hand-sell them or as a reader who picked one for book club or gave it to your best friend for a birthday—well. This book exists because of you. I hope you are happy about this. I am—happy and grateful and a little bit in love with you.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“All of us, every innocent babe born on this planet, gets broken eventually.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Almost Sisters

“she hadn’t known that no one grew up without collecting dings and broken edges.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Almost Sisters

“He was treating me like something breakable, which is different from how you treat something you yourself have broken.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Backseat Saints

“Saying it it loud, she felt every inch of distance between them.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

“oh that's right, you never lie unless your mouth is open and words are coming out of it”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

“You're saying things you can't take back. And you don't even mean them.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

“You go to bed, too, and don’t fret, hear me? Things feel hard now, but it will pass. Everything passes, and something new comes along to fill the space.' As she spoke, her tone shifted. She wasn’t talking about me anymore. 'You can’t go around holding the worst thing you ever did in your hand, staring at it. You gotta cook supper, put gas in the car.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Almost Sisters

“People say, I don’t know how she lives with herself, but every single one of them was living with their own worst thing, just fine. No one walks around holding their ugliest sin in the palm of their hand, staring at it.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Never Have I Ever

“I felt such a well of tenderness for this dear old body. Every piece of it proclaimed how tired it was, but it was lovely, too. Her history was written in it, in the stretch marks left by my father, in the surgery scar on her abdomen and the puckered burn scar on the inside of her left arm, in the simple toll of ninety years of fighting gravity.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Almost Sisters

“I wanted to fall in love, marry a dork like me, make more dorks.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Almost Sisters

“When things went to shit, girls called their mothers”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Almost Sisters

“A pretty woman is a Christmas tree,' my mother told me in the airport. This fella is hanging things on my branches as his gaze sweeps from my face all the way down my body to my hips and then back to my face. Ideas fly from his widened eyes and land on me like teeny, decorative burdens. He is giving me shyness, maybe, some book smarts, and a certain yielding sweetness in bed. The oil-slick eyes get me, and I find myself hanging a few ornaments myself, giving him deft hands and a sense of humor.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Backseat Saints

“She spoke with all the authority vested in her by her flea-market prayer beads and her lotus-flower tramp stamp.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone

“Things feel hard now, but it will pass. Everything passes, and something new comes along to fill the space.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Almost Sisters