Joshilyn Jackson > Quotes

“There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

“God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

“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.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

“Saying it it loud, she felt every inch of distance between them.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

“You're saying things you can't take back. And you don't even mean them.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

“...blind and naked as an unearthed mole, uncomprehending.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Backseat Saints

“This is what Liza knows: People go under. They fall off the world, they go beneath and drown and die. Sometimes, nothing saves you…Liza knows how black the world is, how fast it spins, and how you have to take the taste of apples and the smell of your little girl’s orange zest shampoo where you find them. You have to hold these things and strive, always, for one more word and one more step. You push forward and you fight, for as long as ever you can, until the black world spins and the moon pulls the tide and the water rises up and takes you.”
― Joshilyn Jackson

“I was looking for my ex-lover to break the Sixth Commandment.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Backseat Saints

“Hail to thee, Alabama, thou verdant trollop!”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Gods in Alabama

“That was normal. That was regular and real.. It didn't look like a place [she] could get to from here.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

“She had shown Laura that David was less hers than she had ever thought and the pieces of him she did own were being taken.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

“I'd thought Clarice's smile was both too dim and friendly and too wide and white, so that she looked to me like the love child of a cannibal and a Labrador retriever.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Backseat Saints

“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.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Backseat Saints

“I wanted her note to say that I was a red hole dug out of the guts of her, a seeping wound that hadn’t healed a lick in the twenty-odd years since she had left me.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, Backseat Saints

“sex was where laurel knew she knew him, and talking was the way she called him to her.”
― Joshilyn Jackson, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming