166 Quotes by Tayari Jones

It’s funny how you think you can know a person.

A marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life. And we are not sharing ours.

I have always let you know how much I care, right? You never had to wonder. I’m not a man for words. Daddy showed me that you ‘do’ for a woman. Remember that time when you damn near had a nervous breakdown because it looked like the hickory-nut tree in the front yard was thinking about dying? Where I’m from, we don’t believe in spending money on pets, let alone trees. But I couldn’t bear to see you fret, so I hired a tree doctor. See, in my mind, that was a love letter.

Life is full of things you never figured on.

Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it is gone, nothing is whole again.

But how you feel love and understand love are two different things. Now, so many years down the road, I recognize that I was alone and adrift and that he was lonely in the way that only a ladies’ man can be. He reminded me of Atlanta, and I reminded him of the same. All these were reasons why we were drawn to each other, but standing with him outside of Maroons, we were past reason. Human emotion is beyond comprehension, smooth and uninterrupted, like an orb made of blown glass.

You only lie to people you love.

I don’t want to jeopardize what I have with her over a dream that may not even fit me anymore. She and I are enough to be a family. If you need a kid to keep you together, then how together are you?

If you have a woman, you recognize when you have said the wrong thing. Somehow she rearranges the ions in the air and you can’t breathe as well.