74 Quotes by Joshilyn Jackson

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It wasn’t like the news delighted her, nothing like. But I saw her get a tiny tickle in the schadenfreude as she registered that this happened on Dad’s watch.

Well-spoken white people from prominent families came out on top in our broken court system. It wasn’t fair, but it was true.

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.

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