Top 100 Tayari Jones Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You can never know another person’s mind; this is one thing I have learned.”

— Tayari Jones

52. “But how you feel love and understand love are two different things. Now, so many years down the road, I recognize that I was alone and adrift and that he was lonely in the way that only a ladies’ man can be. He reminded me of Atlanta, and I reminded him of the same. All these were reasons why we were drawn to each other, but standing with him outside of Maroons, we were past reason. Human emotion is beyond comprehension, smooth and uninterrupted, like an orb made of blown glass.”

— Tayari Jones

53. “One of the hurdles of adulthood is when holidays become measuring sticks againt which you always fall short. For children, Thanksgiving is about turkey and Christmas is about presents. Grown up, you learn that all holidays are about family and few can win there.”

— Tayari Jones

54. “I like straightforward names for my characters. When I get too symbolic with names or places, I start feeling like the characters and the story are less read, and I lose interest.”

— Tayari Jones

55. “Life is full of things you never figured on.”

— Tayari Jones

56. “This is what I have come to know: Our past is never passed and there is no such thing as moving on. But there is this telling and there is such a thing as passing through.”

— Tayari Jones

57. “My prayer for you is for peace, which is something you have to make. You can’t just have it.”

— Tayari Jones

58. “Don’t flip the script on semantics,” Celestial said.”

— Tayari Jones

59. “I was kind of an invisible girl when I was young.”

— Tayari Jones

60. “There should be a word for this, the way it feels to steal something that’s already yours.”

— Tayari Jones

61. “He used to say, ‘Accident of birth is the number one predictor of happiness.”

— Tayari Jones

62. “If you lose it every time he tries to come clean, you’re encouraging him to lie.”

— Tayari Jones

63. “A marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life.”

— Tayari Jones

64. “I try and calm myself, remember that I’ve lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn’t kill me then and will not kill me now. But this is what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied.”

— Tayari Jones

65. “Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasionally this is in service of the good.”

— Tayari Jones

66. “I take mentoring very seriously and as a result I hardly get any work done during the school year.”

— Tayari Jones

67. “I’ve likely rolled with punches when I should have hit back,” she said. “But I rolled my way into a life I love.”

— Tayari Jones

68. “You say you want my advice. Here’s what I have. Tell the truth. Don’t try to cushion the blow. If you’re bad enough to do it, you’re bad enough to tell it.”

— Tayari Jones

69. “I thought of Walter again. “Six or twelve,” he sometimes said when he was depressed, which wasn’t all the time but often enough that I recognized a blue mood when it was settling in. “That’s your fate as a black man. Carried by six or judged by twelve.”

— Tayari Jones

70. “She pulled away and walked to my bedroom and closed herself in with a little click of the knob. I could have pursued her. A paper clip could best the catch, but when a woman shuts you out, picking the lock won’t let you back in.”

— Tayari Jones

71. “It’s funny how three or four notes of anger can be struck at once, creating the perfect chord of fury.”

— Tayari Jones

72. “Adolescence is a modern construct and very American in so many ways.”

— Tayari Jones

73. “I know you’re innocent, there is not one doubt in my mind, but I also know that you’re not here.”

— Tayari Jones

74. “And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.”

— Tayari Jones

75. “It takes being together to another level when you go to bed for a purpose larger than your own feelings.”

— Tayari Jones

76. “If you have a woman, you recognize when you have said the wrong thing. Somehow she rearranges the ions in the air and you can’t breathe as well.”

— Tayari Jones

77. “In the private library of my spirit, there is a dictionary of words that aren’t.”

— Tayari Jones

78. “Get on your knees when you talk to the Lord. Do not call yourself praying by lying in the bed thinking. Thinking and praying are two different things, and for something this important, you need prayer.”

— Tayari Jones

79. “But who listens to the wisdom of jewelry? Only our bodies know the truth. Bones don’t lie.”

— Tayari Jones

80. “As for me, I’m modern and traditional at the same time. I, too, believe in intimacy – who doesn’t? But I also believe in commitment. Marriage is, as she says, “a peculiar institution.” My parents’ divorce made it clear what kinds of raw deals are brokered at the altar. But right now, in America, marriage is the closest thing to what I want.”

— Tayari Jones

81. “Did we love so forcefully that night because we knew or because we didn’t? Was there an alarm from the future, a furious bell without its clapper? Did this hopeless bell manage to generate a breeze, causing me to reach to the floor to find my slip and use it to cover myself? Did some subtle warning cause Roy to turn and pin me to my side with his heavy arm? In his sleep, he mumbled something but did not wake.”

— Tayari Jones

82. “Did I imagine that this was our pattern for all time? That we could grow old together, accusing and forgiving? Back then, I dind’t know what forever looked like. Maybe I don’t even know now. But that night in Piney Woods, I believed that our marriage was a fine-spun tapestry, fragile but fixable. We tore it often and mended it, always with a silken thread, lovely but sure to give way.”

— Tayari Jones

83. “In so many ways, you can’t choose what you give to your daughter, you just give her what you have.”

— Tayari Jones

84. “With my eyes on my wife, I would tell the waitress that I liked my coffee like I liked my women, “black and sweet.” This always got me a smile. Then Celestial would say, “I like my mimosa like I like my men: transparent.”

— Tayari Jones

85. “When I was mad, I didn’t raise my voice. Instead, I lowered it to a register that you heard with your bones, not your ears.”

— Tayari Jones

86. “The chilly rationale of hindsight is what exposes the how and why of something that once seemed supernatural. It’s the magician’s manual that shows you how the tricks are done, not with sorcery but with careful cues and mysterious devices.”

— Tayari Jones

87. “When a spectral voice says, get out, you should do it. But in real life, you don’t know that you’re in a scary movie.”

— Tayari Jones

88. “Break your own heart, or they will break it for you.”

— Tayari Jones

89. “I made note of everything about her that I didn’t admire. I ignored the devotion that she wore like a cape, I paid no heed of her strength or hardworking beauty. I sat there thinking. of all I didn’t love about her, to angry to even say good-bye.”

— Tayari Jones

90. “Something shadowy and female happened between them, as mysterious and primal as witches’ brew.”

— Tayari Jones

91. “When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.”

— Tayari Jones

92. “Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.”

— Tayari Jones

93. “You only lie to people you love.”

— Tayari Jones

94. “Babies bring the love with them when they come.”

— Tayari Jones

95. “What right did my father have to the details of my life? He squandered his chance to be the protective father. You can’t come rushing to the rescue six months later. I wasn’t a person to be saved only when it was a convenient time to swoop in.”

— Tayari Jones

96. “I am always urging my students to honor their writing practice, to set up a schedule.”

— Tayari Jones

97. “Every one of us has lain down for a reason that was not love.”

— Tayari Jones

98. “Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it is gone, nothing is whole again.”

— Tayari Jones

99. “You also have to work with the love you are given, with all of the complications clanging behind it like tin cans tied to a bridal sedan.”

— Tayari Jones

100. “We sat at that table, neither able to comfort the other, her remembering being a bystander to my mother’s suffering and me suffering because I was denied the experience.”

— Tayari Jones