74 Quotes by Joshilyn Jackson

She’d only set my mouth, giving me her taste for called saints, good books, and angry men.

I step straight toward the female librarian. She looks soft, as if she’s been raised in a box and purely milk-fed, like veal.

The movement was in me, but it wasn’t me. It was another little something, a someone, willfully choosing to flex his flippery future arms, or whatever it was he had by then. It was a choice, but I hadn’t made it. It was inside me, and mine, but I did not control it.

She never told me to be any different, the jagged scrape of a thousand guilt and fury slivers rasping on my bones became background music, an ever-present hum.

I had spent my whole life hungry for forgiveness. It had not come, so I didn’t know firsthand what he was feeling. But I had imagined it, over and over. I’d wanted it so bad. I’d wanted Kai – or anyone, anyone who knew the worst in me – to say that I was still dear, and good, and worthy.

Her expression is blank and demure, but this girl and I, we have the same shape mouth. I recognize the way she’s set it, like she’s got a ball of mutiny in there, and she is rolling it around to get a thorough taste. She’s not half as placid as she looks.

I had been born and mostly raised in the South, so I ought to have been able to find a way to reach him. Southern girls are trained from birth up that the way to a man’s heart is never through the front door. They may leave a basket of cookies there, and while he’s busy picking them up, they’re squirming in through a back window.

I’d only wanted, desperately, for him to be a thing that I could have.

I could break things in a thousand ways – anything from surgical dismantling as meticulous as a bomb squad work to wrecking ball style mass destruction. If I broke a thing, it stayed broke. If I broke one of my things, I lived with the pieces, or replaced it.