Best 55 quotes of Tayari Jones on MyQuotes

Tayari Jones

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    Tayari Jones

    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.

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    Tayari Jones

    Adolescence is a modern construct and very American in so many ways.

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    Tayari Jones

    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.

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    Tayari Jones

    Dwelling on pain, spending too much time immersed in it, tasting its flavors, fingering its textures--this makes it only more potent.

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    Tayari Jones

    I am always urging my students to honor their writing practice, to set up a schedule.

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    Tayari Jones

    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.

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    Tayari Jones

    I do have a sister - I have two sisters.

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    Tayari Jones

    I don’t mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn’t a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated.

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    Tayari Jones

    I guess this is how love is when it comes undone. No matter how tight you knit the stitches, a sharp tug on a loose thread will transform your warm sweater into a mangled heap of yarn that you can't reuse or repair.

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    Tayari Jones

    I like straightforward names for my characters. When I get too symbolic with names or places, I start feeling like the characters and the story are less read, and I lose interest.

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    Tayari Jones

    I take mentoring very seriously and as a result I hardly get any work done during the school year.

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    Tayari Jones

    I take mentoring very seriously and I am on the board of an organization called Girls Write Now, where we match teen girls and writing mentors because it changes their lives.

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    Tayari Jones

    I think the NAACP isn't recognized enough for all of the work it does, especially in the field of law. They may have faded from view over the last couple of decades, but they are fighting the good fight.

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    Tayari Jones

    It's funny how three or four notes of anger can be struck at once, creating the perfect chord of fury.

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    Tayari Jones

    I was kind of an invisible girl when I was young.

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    Tayari Jones

    My first novel, Leaving Atlanta, took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.

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    Tayari Jones

    Nine Years Under is a sparkling debut--- brimming with love and bursting with life. Booker's Baltimore is equal parts The Wire and The Cosby show. She doesn't shrink from the realities of life in an inner city funeral home, but she is also a loving witness, documenting the big hearted community that takes care of its own. Told with compassion, wit, and good old fashioned story telling, Sheri Booker gives us unforgettable characters who will make you laugh right up until they break your heart.

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    Tayari Jones

    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.

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    Tayari Jones

    Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.

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    Tayari Jones

    The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.

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    Tayari Jones

    This is what I have come to know: Our past is never passed and there is no such thing as moving on. But there is this telling and there is such a thing as passing through.

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    Tayari Jones

    When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

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    Tayari Jones

    When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.

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    Tayari Jones

    When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

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    Tayari Jones

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

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    Tayari Jones

    A woman doesn't always have a choice, not in a meaningful way. Sometimes there is a debt that must be paid, a comfort that she is obliged to provide, a safe passage that must be secured. Everyone of us has lain down for a reason that was not love.

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    Tayari Jones

    But in truth, I was different now, burning and anointed.

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    Tayari Jones

    But neither of us closed our eyes against the immeasurable dark of that silent night.

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    Tayari Jones

    But who listens to the wisdom of jewelry? Only our bodies know the truth. Bones don't lie.

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    Tayari Jones

    Daddy said, "At some point you will come to accept your limitations." "Do you accept yours?" I asked, with challenge in my voice. "But of course, Ladybug. That's what marriage teaches you.

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    Tayari Jones

    Did I imagine that this was our pattern for all time? That we could grow old together, accusing and forgiving? Back then, I dind’t know what forever looked like. Maybe I don’t even know now. But that night in Piney Woods, I believed that our marriage was a fine-spun tapestry, fragile but fixable. We tore it often and mended it, always with a silken thread, lovely but sure to give way.

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    Tayari Jones

    Don't make your daughter feel like she got to lay with who you want her to lay with, like you're some kind of pimp.

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    Tayari Jones

    Everything I do is a love letter addressed to you.

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    Tayari Jones

    Get on your knees when you talk to the Lord. Do not call yourself praying by lying in the bed thinking. Thinking and praying are two different things, and for something this important, you need prayer.

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    Tayari Jones

    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.

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    Tayari Jones

    I know who I married, too. You're in me. When I touch you, your flesh communicates with my bones.

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    Tayari Jones

    I like my mimosas like I like my men...transparent.

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    Tayari Jones

    I'm bringing this up because I knew that things like this happen to people, but by people, I didn't mean us.

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    Tayari Jones

    In response, he gave an almost imperceptible shoulder shrug that said, White folk gonna white folk.

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    Tayari Jones

    Is it love, or is it convenience?... She explained that connivence, habit, comfort, obligation- these are all things that wear the same clothing as love sometimes.

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    Tayari Jones

    Mama, I said, and then the crying came. I had not cried since I was sentenced and I had humiliated myself before a judge who didn't care. On that horrible day, my snotty sobbing had merged with Celestial and Olive's morning accompaniment. Now I suffered a cappella; the weeping burned my throat like when you vomit strong liquor. That one word, Mama, was my only prayer as I phrased on the ground like I was feeling the Holy Ghost, only what I was going through wasn't rapture. I spasmed on that cold black earth in pain, physical pain. My joints hurt; I experienced what felt like a baton against the back of my head. It was like I relived every injury of my life.. The pain went on until it didn't. and I say up, dirty and spent.

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    Tayari Jones

    Marriage is complicated.

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    Tayari Jones

    Marriage is like grafting a limb onto a tree trunk. You have the limb, freshly sliced, dripping sap, and smelling of springtime, and then you have the mother tree stripped of her protective bark, gouged and ready to receive this new addition. Some years ago, my father performed this surgery on a dogwood tree in the side yard. He tried a pink-blooming limb stolen from the woods to my mother's white-blooming tree from a nursery lot. It took yards of burlap and twine and two years for the plants to join. Even now, all these years later, there's something not quite natural about the tree, even in its amazing two-tone glory.

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    Tayari Jones

    Maybe that's what it means to be in love, to willingly be at the mercy of another person.

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    Tayari Jones

    Memory is a queer creature, an eccentric curator.

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    Tayari Jones

    One of the hurdles of adulthood is when holidays become measuring sticks againt which you always fall short. For children, Thanksgiving is about turkey and Christmas is about presents. Grown up, you learn that all holidays are about family and few can win there.

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    Tayari Jones

    Ours was a love story, the kind that’s not supposed to happen to black girls anymore. This was vintage romance made scarce after Dr. King, along with Negro-owned dress shops, drugstores, and cafeterias.

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    Tayari Jones

    People say, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you, doesn't kill you.

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    Tayari Jones

    She pulled away and walked to my bedroom and closed herself in with a little click of the knob. I could have pursued her. A paper clip could best the catch, but when a woman shuts you out, picking the lock won’t let you back in.

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    Tayari Jones

    Some things were inevitable. You'd have to be a fool to think otherwise.