The Star Side of Bird Hill Quotes

“[T]he only thing that has power over you is what you can't say, even to yourself.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“She wore her body like a mistake she hoped to one day be forgiven for.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Maybe this is what growing old was like, she thought. Maybe the world gets smaller and smaller until there's nothing but the walls around you to show you where you end and the rest of the world begins.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“[I]t wasn't so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in their aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Learn to see past the face people show you.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“One of the things that confirmed Hyacinth’s suspicion that America was an evil, lonely place was that people were islands unto themselves. And so when Avril drifted away, there was no friend or neighbor or pastor or coworker to reach out to and ask after her child.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“One day you will see that what must be born will be born. Everything else will find another way.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Sweetness, the only thing that has power over you is what you can’t say, even to yourself.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Hyacinth said that it was a gift to greet a new day, and that you needed to meet it in a way that showed how grateful you were to have your life spared. Phaedra wasn't sure what Hyacinth meant, exactly, but she did like the routines and rituals they had, the way they made a kind of container so her mind could wander to the things she thought and felt and dreamed about.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“The one mistake I made was in thinking that someone could save me. [...] You can't wait for someone else to save you from the life you made for yourself. If I teach you girls anything, I hope it's how to gird up your loins and face the fate that's yours.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“When they were done, Dionne took her panties in one hand and her new Bible in the other and let the breeze when it came touch her where Trevor had before. She felt wiser somehow, an looking at the church lit up above, thought that maybe this kin of pleasure could be her religion.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Sweetness, the only thing that has power over you is what you can't say, even to yourself. [...] Everything hurt needs sun and air to heal it.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Almost twenty years into living in the States, she had no illusions of moving home and starting over again like the other women she knew who went home every year, packed barrels and kept up with phone calls, went to the meetings of the old boys' and old girls' clubs of their high schools where fattened, impoverished versions of themselves showed up in the harsh lights of church basements of Brooklyn, picking over the grains of famous stories from the old days and new stories about who had done well or not well at all in what they liked to call "this man country.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“In Brooklyn, Barbados was bimshire, a jewel that Bajans turned over in their minds, a candy whose sweetness they sucked on whenever the bitter cold and darkness of life in America became too much to bear.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“And she knew that this was the thing that would harm Dionne in the end, not her foolishness but the foolhardy way in which she clung to her own terrible ideas. She knew that this was Avril's undoing, not that she'd made the wrong choices, but that she'd been so unwilling to let anyone in to see the lie of her marriage, this masking was worse than the original mistake. Sixty-three years on this earth has taught Hyacinth that it wasn't so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in the aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out. It was the women who held too tightly to the dream of their husband's fidelity who unraveled, the parents who clasped their children too close who lost them, the me who grieved too deeply the lives they'd wanted and would never have who saw their sadness consume them. Hyacinth worried about Dionne because of her hard way of being in the world, the way she could only see the world through the lens of her own flawed feelings.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Don't tempt the devil darling. He'll give you the worse bits you asked for, plus what you couldn't even imagine.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Who don't listen, feels.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“When they were done, Dionne took her panties in one hand and her new Bible in the other and let the breeze when it came touch her where Trevor had before. She felt wiser somehow, and looking at the church lit up above, thought that maybe this kind of pleasure could be her religion”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Phaedra's body pulled at the light, testing the softer side of midnight. Hyacinth usually slipped out of bed in the middle of the night, careful to fit her rustle inside Phaedra's dreams.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Hyacinth took out a bottle of rum, and Phaedra raised her eyebrows, a reflex she'd acquired upon seeing her father and mother under its influence, their eyes and mouths turned wilder, as if a cork at the edges of their personalities had come unscrewed.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill