42 Quotes by Jackie Kay

Loss isn’t an absence after all. It is a presence. A strong presence right next to me. I look at it. It doesn’t look like anything, that’s what is so strange. It just fits in.

Sometimes you remember your life in photographs that were never taken.

How blazing and alive the past is. The color of the wallpaper in the bedroom you had as a girl. It’s not so much that you’ve lost your memory, more like you’re submerged in it, like you’re living in the brightly vivid underwater world of the past.

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.

My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That’s what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation.

I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. Nor did I feel ambitious any more. It all seemed stupid wanting to be better than the others in the same ring, shallow, pointless.

I think I’ll get a nut roast. Maybe a nut roast is too lesbian?

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

Loss isn’t an absence after all. It is a presence.