Top 35 Jess Kidd Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is the smell of a million mould-blossomed pages, of a thousand decaying bindings, of a universe of dead words.”

— Jess Kidd

2. “And the trees still hold strong. Their canopies drinking every soft grey sky and their roots spreading down deep in the dark, nuzzling clutches of old bones and fingering lost coins. They throw their branches up in wild dances whenever a storm comes in off the bay.”

— Jess Kidd

3. “For the dead don’t change or grow. They’re just echoes of the stories of their own lives sung back in the wrong order: arsewards. They’re the pattern on closed eyelids after you turn away from a bright object. They are twice-exposed film. They’re not really there, so cause and effect means nothing to them.”

— Jess Kidd

4. “My sister said that when the tide was out you could walk all the way to America; the waves pulled back that far. So far that the starfish forgot there ever was an ocean and stiffened with dismay. So far that the seaweed wept itself dry on the rocks with nostalgia.”

— Jess Kidd

5. “For this is their parting: as sudden and slow, surprising and foreseen as any parting. Between together and apart: an eyeblink and all of eternity.”

— Jess Kidd

6. “An interview with Quinn is like fighting a yellow snake in a sandpit.’ Desmond.”

— Jess Kidd

7. “Sir Edmund’s home is an architectural grotesque, the ornate facade the unlikely union of a warship and a wedding cake. A riot of musket loops, carved shells, liquorice-twist chimneys, mock battlements, a first-floor prow, and an exuberance of portholes. On the carved stone pediment above the wide front door Neptune cavorts with sea nymphs. The lower-floor windows are festooned with theatrical swags of stone starfish and scallop shells. For all this, the house looks unlived in.”

— Jess Kidd

8. “For the dead are always close by in a life like Mahony’s. The dead are drawn to the confused and the unwritten, the damaged and the fractured, to those with big cracks and gaps in their tales, which the dead just yearn to fill. For the dead have secondhand stories to share with you, if you’d only let them get a foot in the door.”

— Jess Kidd

9. “The raven turns in her element and the world turns too, confirming what she already knew: she is the centre of everything.”

— Jess Kidd

10. “The moon knows; she sees all.”

— Jess Kidd

11. “Words are capable of flying. They dart through windows, over fences, between bar stools and across courtyards. They travel rapidly from mouth to ear, from ear to mouth. And as they go, they pick up speed and weight and substance and gravity. Until they land with a scud, take seed and grow as fast as the unruliest of beanstalks.”

— Jess Kidd

12. “And the woman finally saw that what is terrible can also be beautiful.”

— Jess Kidd

13. “But the trees knew, and so did the bees, for they know all things.”

— Jess Kidd

14. “This is a practical woman, or at least a woman who finds it practical to be able to fit through doorways, climb stairs, and breathe.”

— Jess Kidd

15. “It is a truth universally unacknowledged that when the dead are trying to remember something, the living are trying harder to forget it.”

— Jess Kidd

16. “The world can think you’re all wrong if there’s one person who thinks you’re just right.”

— Jess Kidd

17. “My creative juices only flow freely in the dark. My mind is like a mushroom: if you shine the light of the one true church on it, well then, inspiration may not spore at all.”

— Jess Kidd

18. “At best she had viewed poor Lydia as a dress-up doll, at worst an inconvenience, like February or indigestion.”

— Jess Kidd

19. “And all at once Bridie is filled with the hot rage that comes over any sane woman who rails against her market price, or the damnable fact that there is a market price in the first place.”

— Jess Kidd

20. “Stories, particularly the bad ones, are told in their own time.”

— Jess Kidd

21. “If they stayed in a place more than a few weeks, Gil knew there was a danger that Mum would cave in to convention and send him to the local school. This riled them both. Presentation this day, project that day, try not to stand out, forever the new kid. Hide the bruises, hide the notes home, or else Mum might appear at the school stumbling and swearing. The other kids looking on, excited to see an adult unravel.”

— Jess Kidd

22. “Those we have lost return to us in their own time.”

— Jess Kidd

23. “Wait until I am seemly, Visitor. I am preparing a respectable facade.”

— Jess Kidd

24. “She’s put him out like a cat a million times, but like a cat he has a habit of slinking back and curling up into the warm corners of her mind.”

— Jess Kidd

25. “Mahoney sees that she is locked down and bolted. If she were a castle she would have wound up the drawbridge and woken the archers by now.”

— Jess Kidd

26. “Not for the first time I count myself lucky that I am free-range in my enterprises and not imprisoned in some administrative battery farm, breathing air heavy with regret and thwarted dreams.”

— Jess Kidd

27. “You must never watch a leaving friend out of sight, else you’ll not see them return.”

— Jess Kidd

28. “I am not frightened while I hear birds sing. For I remember that birds fly away when something bad is about to happen: they sense what’s coming. And the birds are singing all around us, brightly, persistently.”

— Jess Kidd

29. “Here is time held in suspension. Yesterday pickled. Eternity in a jar.”

— Jess Kidd

30. “The office, like most offices, has the fake-cheerful feel of death row, with its jokey signs and personal possessions. This is a place that sucks up time and energy on pointless tasks and futile activities and leaves little to show for human endeavor but a growing collection of novelty mugs.”

— Jess Kidd

31. “She puts her hands up to her poor head, as if to hide it from me. It is hairless, pale, with a few fine gray strands at the sides. I put my arms around my friend. There are no saints for this.”

— Jess Kidd

32. “He has the look of someone whose soul got up and walked away in disgust a long time ago.”

— Jess Kidd

33. “Memory is like a wayward dog. Sometimes it drops the ball and sometimes it brings it, and sometimes it doesn’t bring a ball at all; it brings a shoe.”

— Jess Kidd

34. “The wind grabbed a handful of sand and scattered it like bright confetti along the hard-packed, sea-scoured, deserted beach. The sky had a newly rinsed look, the clouds spun and wrung out on high.”

— Jess Kidd

35. “It’s the hottest April in living and dead memory. So hot that the crows are flying with their tongues hanging out of their heads.”

— Jess Kidd