74 Quotes by Joshilyn Jackson

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.

She was the avatar of the town as it used to be in some Old South utopia that only existed if you were white and well-to-do and Baptist and didn’t notice how folks who weren’t all of those things had fared.

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

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.

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

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

Saying it it loud, she felt every inch of distance between them.

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.

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