Jill McCorkle > Quotes

“If a nuclear disaster occurred, and you had to live out those final painful days just stretched out somewhere thinking about your life--This is who I am. This is what I love. This is what I believe--who would you want hearing your whispers? Or perhaps better: Who do you trust to hear your whispers? Whose breath do you want mingled with your own? Whose flesh still warm beside you?”
― Jill McCorkle

“The pain of losing people you love is the price of the ticket for getting to know them at all.”
― Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

“We used to all come outside when the streetlights came on and prowl the neighborhood in a pack, a herd of kids on banana-seat bikes and minibikes. The grown-ups looked so silly framed in their living-room and kitchen windows. They complained about their days and sighed deep sighs of depression and loss. They talked about how spoiled and lucky children were these days. We will never be that way, we said, we will never say those things.”
― Jill McCorkle

“The simple rule: some get saved, but most don't. The choices are important before the years begin to go so very fast.”
― Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

“Disasters make people appreciate what they should always appreciate anyway. The great human paradox is we’re so stupid it never lasts.”
― Jill McCorkle, Old Crimes: and Other Stories

“...he was convinced that if he claimed all the parts he really loved he would be able to make peace with everything else.”
― Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

“She is Sisyphus. All day long she pushes that rock and when she is almost to the top, something happens to distract her and it all rolls back to the very place the journey began. Some day she will make it to the top. Some perfect day she will stand, wind in her face and watch it barreling down the other side, taking anything and anybody in its path. But until then she will travel this worn and familiar road, sure-footed and steady in real time, eyes vigilantly focused on the life before her. She is the cobbler of her own heart and this will save her soul.”
― Jill McCorkle

“Make their exits as gentle and loving as possible...Tell them how good it will be, even if you don't believe it yourself. You're southern, you know how to do that.”
― Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

“finally she feels free - not perfect, not problem free, just free”
― Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

“She tried to teach her children to be positive--to dream but to also do it with their feet on the ground. If you let loose that balloon, you will lose sight of it, she said. The best way to enjoy it is to hold tight to the string and plant your feet on a good solid path.”
― Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

“We live days and weeks and months and years with so little awareness of life. We wait for the bad things that wake us up and shock our systems. But every now and then, on the most average day, it occurs to you that this is it. This is all there is.”
― Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

“When she doesn’t want to think about something sad or hurtful, she does what she instructed her own children and those she taught to do: Close your eyes and go somewhere safe and good. Picture something good.”
― Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

“No one likes to talk about the positive parts of getting older and aging into orphanhood, how with your parents you often bury a lot of things you were never able to confront or fix or let go of.”
― Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

“I am homesick and I am timesick . . . I miss all that no longer is," Lil says.”
― Jill McCorkle, Hieroglyphics

“They were such an unlikely couple and there is such power in the relationship that never takes place in a permanent way, the "mights" romantically overwhelming all that likely would have been truth.”
― Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

“It was 1965 and life seemed easier. Her parents were alive and so was her brother, her bones were hard and strong and her vision perfect....It was 1965 and she was filled with hope, lush pots of ivy spilling from her window boxes as she leaned out late in the day to see the sunset, to smell the river, to watch her husband turn the corner as he headed home. She was so alive.”
― Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

“It made me realize that Beatrice had changed; that she did not pull her wagon so much as she got taken for rides.”
― jill mccorkle

“The longest and most expensive journey you will ever make is the one to yourself.”
― Jill McCorkle, Life After Life

“The older he got, the less he believed and then the less he believed the more capable he was of believing. "Such a cool paradox." He said.”
― Jill McCorkle