Top 60 Joshilyn Jackson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel’s, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

2. “God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

3. “Miracle is another word for magic, and magic is only science, unexplained.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

4. “A whole slew of them lived outside Immita on a big piece of trailer-dotted land everyone called Ducktown, and they were all cousins and brothers and aunts with one another so many times over that it was hard to tell who was exactly related and how. Growing up, I’d had six or so in school right around my grade, but I was a sophomore now, and only one was left. Either the rest had failed so many times I’d left them behind by middle school or they had plain dropped out. OMG.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

5. “My plan was to go on my run, grab Ms. Fancy, drive like a cocaine-attled hell bat to the airport and hurl her and her bags out as I slowed down in the drop off lane.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

6. “You’re saying things you can’t take back. And you don’t even mean them.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

7. “Things feel hard now, but it will pass. Everything passes, and something new comes along to fill the space.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

8. “Oh, honey,” she said, her tone echoing Wattie’s. “I’m not sick. I’m only dying.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

9. “She’s stepped right in and owned me, and yet, it does not feel like surrender. There is choice inside surrender. This is something much more basic.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

10. “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

11. “The South was like that optical-illusion drawing of the duck that is at the same time a rabbit. I’d always see the duck first, his round eye cheery and his bill seeming to smile. But if I shifted my gaze, the duck’s bill morphed into flattened, worried ears. The cheery eye, reversed, held fear, and I could see only a solemn rabbit. The Souths were like that drawing. Both existed themselves, but they were so merged that I could shift from one and find myself inside the other without moving.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

12. “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

13. “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

14. “William Ashe doesn’t believe in destiny. The word itself is actually shorthand people use when they wish to mysticize random events or externalize the results of their own willful choices.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

15. “Her expression is blank and demure, but this girl and I, we have the same shape mouth. I recognize the way she’s set it, like she’s got a ball of mutiny in there, and she is rolling it around to get a thorough taste. She’s not half as placid as she looks.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

16. “I wanted to fall in love, marry a dork like me, make more dorks.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

17. “All of us, every innocent babe born on this planet, gets broken eventually.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

18. “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

19. “We were so careful with each other. We had to be. We touched softly in deference to all the ways that we were wounded, working around each other’s bruises and ruined places.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

20. “I’d only wanted, desperately, for him to be a thing that I could have.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

21. “Pee-poo are like dis, Rachel had told me once, putting the peachy-pink Crayola that used to be called Flesh into my hand. As if all the flesh that mattered was that color. That crayon was called Peach now, but the ideas behind its old name were still alive and present. Present everywhere, all across the country, but more overt in Birchville. I wouldn’t raise Digby.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

22. “I’d thought Clarice’s smile was both too dim and friendly and too wide and white, so that she looked to me like the love child of a cannibal and a Labrador retriever.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

23. “She spoke with all the authority vested in her by her flea-market prayer beads and her lotus-flower tramp stamp.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

24. “I’ve never had an angel on my right shoulder; I was born with a pointy-tailed devil, who crept back and forth across my neck to get his whispers into both my ears.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

25. “Parenthood shouldn’t work this way. Fathers shouldn’t get to decide if they wanted to father or not, thirteen years in. Fathers who weren’t dead should do their damn job.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

26. “God gives us tears so other know when we need help.” from the book Gods in Alabama.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

27. “The movement was in me, but it wasn’t me. It was another little something, a someone, willfully choosing to flex his flippery future arms, or whatever it was he had by then. It was a choice, but I hadn’t made it. It was inside me, and mine, but I did not control it.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

28. “I’d have to run away to New York and be a hooker and eat a pound of heroin and die.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

29. “Young men see pretty, and they start hanging all the things they hope you’ll be onto you till you’re so weighed down you can’t move.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

30. “That’s not how families are structured. In families, he realized, children are added to, not superseded. The addition of a child is not a betrayal of previous or current children.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

31. “Odd to think of myself that way, small and blind and tethered to her. In that time before memory, everything I touched was hers. I heard her voice from the inside, with no idea that she was a separate person. Back then, she had simply been the world.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

32. “The wold was full of us, the leftovers and the leavers, the bereaved and the broken.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

33. “The playground song in my head went, First comes love, then comes hideous betrayal, then comes endless regret requiring expensive therapy. It was a terrible song. It didn’t even rhyme. But it was mine, and I hadn’t made a family, even though I’d wanted one.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

34. “I was looking for my ex-lover to break the Sixth Commandment.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

35. “This was another pretend, and here in a yard on a bench was his real wife, with sad, kind, tired eyes. The lesson of Mimmy and my dad was not for me. It was for her. It was for them. I was so sick with understanding that I was practically yelling at her.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

36. “I hoped she wouldn’t realize how spectacular she was until she was twenty-five and safely past letting it ruin her.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

37. “I could break things in a thousand ways – anything from surgical dismantling as meticulous as a bomb squad work to wrecking ball style mass destruction. If I broke a thing, it stayed broke. If I broke one of my things, I lived with the pieces, or replaced it.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

38. “I wanted to show up. I wanted you to know, I will show up.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

39. “William didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in Bridget’s love for God. It was a manifestation of her love of goodness, and William could believe in goodness. He saw it in her. He loved it in her. If.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

40. “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.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

41. “She was exactly like her house, expensive and elegant, but not at all comfortable.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

42. “Lavender and I have been living in a house of cards, while Smiley Daddy took us to Greece. He.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

43. “You have a person around for years, maybe you get fond of them even if they aren’t really anything to you, and that struck me as huge and important in some way I couldn’t get a good hold on.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

44. “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

45. “I step straight toward the female librarian. She looks soft, as if she’s been raised in a box and purely milk-fed, like veal.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

46. “It was love, though. Love, or some other, nameless feeling that was sister to it. I was racked with it. It thundered through me, shook my frame... This, I thought. This is how supervillains start.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

47. “In fight or flight Kai has always chose for us, and my mother is made out of wings. I don’t think I am like her, not in this way.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

48. “I wanted her note to say that I was a red hole dug out of the guts of her, a seeping wound that hadn’t healed a lick in the twenty-odd years since she had left me.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

49. “Now, I don’t think about it.” Or when I did, I mostly felt a terrible relief. Truly terrible, like a person who’s been told they no longer have to carry the weight of their own gangrenous and rotting left arm. It smells, it hurts, it’s literally killing you – but it’s still the only left arm that you’ll ever have.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

50. “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