Magnolia Parks Quotes

“If it wasn’t him, it would be you,” I tell him, for better and for worse. He blows some more air out of his mouth and catches my eye. “In another life, yeah?” I nod and offer him a weak smile. “I’ll meet you there.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“What do I have to show for this life? Her. It’s her. Loving her. That’s all I’ve got, and he’s saying I’ve not even fucking done that well. Everyone has markers for their life. Ways they remember certain things and times. Stakes in the ground. She’s mine. My whole life, all dotted with and by things I remember about her. She’s how I frame the world.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“You’re all here to bury the smartest girl, the sharpest shooter in the whole wide world. But I’m burying my guiding light.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“A love like ours—? Are you joking?” I give her the magic smile. “We’re what the poems are about”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“But you see, the thing about stars is that in another galaxy, that star is also a sun. “If it wasn’t him, it would be you,” I tell him, for better and for worse. He blows some more air out of his mouth and catches my eye. “In another life, yeah?” I nod and offer him a weak smile. “I’ll meet you there.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“You want a metaphor for it? Alright, here goes. I come from a good family, everyone knows that. My parents were great, roof over my head. I never wanted for much, really, and still. She’s the only home I’ve ever been interested in having. Her body is the walls, heart’s the ceiling. I’ll live here forever.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“How many loves do you get in a lifetime? That’s a question I’ve wondered before … If you ask The Sun, I’ve had far too many, and in some ways that’s true, I have. But actually, I’ve only had two great ones.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“Will you walk me down the aisle?” I ask him. “At the wedding?” He looks down at me and smiles a bit. “Honour of a lifetime.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“Wherever she is, it’s good. I know it is.” “How?” I ask. He shrugs like it’s easy. “Because she’s there.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“See you soon?” I say to our reflection. She’d give me a small smile, and I think she’d be a bit sad because I know how much she loves me. “Not too soon, please,” she’d say, because that’s not what she’d want for me. “Not too soon,” I say, nodding. “But one day again.” And then I close my little mirror, lay it down next to her ashes and let her go.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“He lets out my favourite laugh that feels like a cup of tea on a rainy day, and his face looks the kind of happy I always want it to with a smile that touches his eyes.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“I feel that it's important for you to know that even if I didn't love you in the sort of stupid, embarrassing way that I do; if I did, hypothetically, have a choice - I would choose you anyway.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“You know how ballerinas pick a spot to look at when they’re doing a pirouette so they don’t get dizzy? Bridget was Magnolia’s spot on the wall.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“How many loves do you get in a lifetime—” She gives me a quick smile. “That is a question I’ve pondered on for a lot of years now . . . And I’ve come up with varying degrees of the same answer. That there are lots of different kinds of love that life may afford you the chance to experience over the course of one’s life—some terrible, some misguided, some well-meaning, some dangerous, some wonderful but benign, some painful, some—when you lose them—are agony.” She sniffs and swallows. “If you’re lucky, you might get a great one, and I know I’m the luckiest, because I got two.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“Everyone moves around me these days like I’m made of glass. Like one wrong look and I’ll shatter. Little do they know that it’s too late . . . All of me already is all shattered. A mosaic of cracks and agony.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“Not a day has gone by since I met you where I’ve not loved you.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“To anyone whom the more sting-y parts of this book resonate with, anyone who’s grieved or is grieving or has lost or is losing, anyone who worries about the black, empty nothingness . . . everything is going to be okay. Okay?”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“I’ve been without him before, it’s not a life I’m interested in having”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“She’s the only home I’ve ever been interested in having. Her body is the walls, heart’s the ceiling. I’ll live here forever.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“Terrible days are sneaks, aren’t they? They love to lull you into a false sense of safety. Dress themselves up in the terrible mundane, make you think that everything’s okay when actually, nothing is.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point . . . The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful and full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“The curves of his chest carved into my memory the same way you won’t ever forget your best day. He is my best day.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“It was always him. I knew that, even at the time, even when I tried to fill the gap he left in me with other people, it was and always will be him.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“It’s the worst realization I’ve ever come to: how many people you’re surrounded by has absolutely no correlation at all to how alone you really are.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“I wish I could tell you all the ways that I tell you I love you without telling you that I love you, but I don’t know what they are—” She kind of sighs and I look for her eyes. “Because I think at this point all of me is a big fucking ode to just loving you—”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“You are the thing that the poets write about, you are what the choir of angels is singing about, you are the thing that clouds part above and the sun beams down upon. You're every butterfly, in every stomach. You're my every tender thought.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“I’ve loved this face all my life. It’s the sun I pray to, and if what we have is a temple, I built it with my bare hands—I nearly died trying to build this fucking thing. Built it til my hands were raw and bloodied. And I’ll die on the altar of loving her, happily too. That’s not a waste to me.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“What do I have to show for this life? Her. It’s her. Loving her.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“I think surprise deaths are the worst. Do you ever think about it? How you love a person who’s made of mostly bone? Because it’s all I think about now. That the thing protecting the heart I would do anything for—that I’d die for—all that’s protecting it is a ribby cage made from collagen, calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate. That’s it. And some muscle.”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark

“He lets out my favourite laugh that feels like a cup of tea on a rainy day,”
― Jessa Hastings, Magnolia Parks: Into the Dark