Silver Sparrow Quotes

“Abandonment doesn't have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It's like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“People say, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you, doesn't kill you.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“I knew by then that I would never have my mother back, not in the way I had known her all my life. When you have seen your mother shattered, there's no putting her back together. There will always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she will never be stronger than a cracked plate.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“The key to life," he told me once, "is to avoid the highs and the lows. It's the peaks and valleys that mess you up.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“PEOPLE SAY, THAT which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn’t kill you, doesn’t kill you. That’s all you get. Sometimes, you just have to hope that’s enough.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“He's your father, but first he is a man. A man is just a man, and that's all we have to wok with.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“I am neither religious nor superstitious, but there is something otherworldly about the space where two roads come together. The devil is said to set up shop there if you want to swap your soul for something more useful. If you believe that God can be bribed, it's also the hallowed ground to make sacrifices. In the literal sense, it's also a place to change direction, but once you've changed it, you're stuck until you come to another crossroads, and who knows how long that will be.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“Silver” is what I called girls who were natural beauties but who also smoothed on a layer of pretty from a jar. It wasn’t just how they looked, it was how they were. The name came from a song my mother sang sometimes when she was getting dressed to go out somewhere special. She sang along with Aretha Franklin at the end: “Sail on, silver girl… Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“If there was ever a time to boil up some grits it is now.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“What right did my father have to the details of my life? He squandered his chance to be the protective father. You can't come rushing to the rescue six months later. I wasn't a person to be saved only when it was a convenient time to swoop in.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“The truth is a strange thing. Like pornography, you know it when you see it.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“The bitter scratch of his unshaven good-night kiss will always, for me, be the sensation of grief.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“It's funny how three or four notes of anger can be struck at once, creating the perfect chord of fury.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“...she went about her business in a way that put me in mind of an old matchbook. You can scratch the head against the strip in the same way you always have but you are not going to get any kind of spark.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“My skin stayed the same while this difference snuck in through a pore and attached itself to whatever brittle part forms my center.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“Some things were inevitable. You'd have to be a fool to think otherwise.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“You can't tell your teacher that my name is James Witherspoon. Atlanta ain't nothing but a country town, and everyone knows everybody.
Your other wife and your other girl is a secret?, I asked him.
He put me down from his lap, so we could look each other in the face. No. You've got it the wrong way around. Dana you are the one that's a secret.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“Everything was almost the same with her, but she went about her business in a way that put me in mind of an old matchbook. You can scratch the head against the strip in the same way you always have, but you are not going to get any kind of spark.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“...living here, you don't know anything about white people. Where I'm from, everything is mixed. In Atlanta, at least out here where we stay at, everything is so black that y'all don't know what it feels like to be black.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“You only lie to people you love”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“Life is full of things you never figured on.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“This, I now know, is how people go crazy and do things they regret. Look at the woman who almost killed Al Green.I am sure she cooked those grits, fully intending to eat them for breakfast. Then he did something that set her off. After that, she probably picked up the pot, just to scare him a little bit. Next thing she knew and the boiling grits were all over his face. There was a name for that kind of thing. "Crime of passion." It meant that it wasn't your fault.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“But I lived in a world where you could never want what you wanted out in the open.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“She and I have a connection. Today, the link is rusty, the current erratic, but there will always be something between us.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“The next customer in line was a white woman who had purchased a set of baby’s pajamas for her pregnant sister.

“Men,” the customer said. “Who can understand the way their minds work?”

Mother knew what the lady was talking about, but she couldn’t laugh at a black man with her, even though she was only laughing at him for being a man.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“People say, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you, doesn't kill you. That's all you get. Sometimes, you just have to hope that's enough.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“It's funny how you think you can know a person”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“...and I wondered what it felt like to live inside such disloyal skin.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“Marriage is complicated.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow