42 Quotes by Jackie Kay

When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.

You noticed things. You're not sure when you start. It's only when you've noticed - noticed that you know you've noticed. Maybe between the first time when you're staring to think, Is this what I think it is? and the second time when you think, Yes, between those two times, there's a silence. A pause.

I remember watching my grandmother build her fire,the honest kindling, the twisted newspaper,the tiny tower of good black coal.And how, once lit, she'd hold a sheet of newspaperacross the fire and say, 'watch it suck, dear'.- An Old Woman's Fire

You cannot penalize a man for one slip. Then she lay wondering about the word slip. When you slip, you fall, but maybe it is not such a sore fall because you have slipped.

The tall trees, compassionate, understood everything:grief - they stood stock-still, branches drooped in despair;fear - they exposed their many roots, tugged their gold hair;anger - they shook in the storm, pointed their bony fingers. - The World of Trees (inspired by the Forest of Burnley)

The beautiful have so much easier a time of it than the ugly, don't you think? They get smiled at the whole time. Strangers offer them things. People notice the beautiful; the beautiful are constantly acknowledged.

During this period I feel as if some part of myself has been banished to another part of the world.I feel as if I cannot live my life to the full and feel everything I’m capable of feeling unless I have this love. The pleasure goes from me; the delight goes. Nothing means anything.

When it rains like that, dark in the afternoon, you feel like you've been taken into the past.

Life, he told me, was like a fork of lightning. He could see exactly where one decision violently parted company with another and a new future flared up before him.