Best 18 quotes of Jackie Kay on MyQuotes

(After meeting her birth mother after more than 40 years) We exchange bunches of orchids, laughing at the coincidence of the flowers. A little unnerving: I wonder if that choice has anything to do with genetics. ... I want to take mine home and look after them so that they live for days. I might spray the leaves, and make sure they sit in an easterly window, and keep them out of the direct sun.

How blazing and alive the past is. The color of the wallpaper in the bedroom you had as a girl. It's not so much that you've lost your memory, more like you're submerged in it, like you're living in the brightly vivid underwater world of the past.

Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence. A strong presence right next to me. I look at it. It doesn't look like anything, that's what is so strange. It just fits in.

Nearly dying brings you closer to living. There's a thin border; you feel yourself cross it, going back to the land of the living, going home. Perhaps, if you'd gone the other way, death would have been a different home.

Sometimes you remember your life in photographs that were never taken.

These days I can't tell what I really feel.

When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.

How bizarre, i think to myself, to be on a train and to actually not want to arrive anywhere? What kind of madness is that?

I didn't feel like I was missing anything. Nor did I feel ambitious any more. It all seemed stupid wanting to be better than the others in the same ring, shallow, pointless.

I remember watching my grandmother build her fire, the honest kindling, the twisted newspaper, the tiny tower of good black coal. And how, once lit, she'd hold a sheet of newspaper across the fire and say, 'watch it suck, dear'. - An Old Woman's Fire

It's as if my footprints were already on the road before I even got there.I walk into them, my waiting footprints.

I've never seen grief like it. Grief like that, it's like an animal. She's not eating. She's not sleeping. She's whimpering. She's sluggish. She's not herself

I've started to feel very odd within my own life. It's most peculiar to feel lonely inside your own life.

She walked on and on as though if she walked far enough she might walk this thing out of her. As if by walking long enough, hard enough, she might forget.

Some men fall in love with a woman, Some women fall in love with a man, Some men fall in love with another man, Some women fall in love with another woman - But I, my dear one, fell in love with Shetland. - Shetland

The beautiful have so much easier a time of it than the ugly, don't you think? They get smiled at the whole time. Strangers offer them things. People notice the beautiful; the beautiful are constantly acknowledged.

The tall trees, compassionate, understood everything: grief - they stood stock-still, branches drooped in despair; fear - they exposed their many roots, tugged their gold hair; anger - they shook in the storm, pointed their bony fingers. - The World of Trees (inspired by the Forest of Burnley)

Writers give readers courage – the courage to be utterly your complete and complex self. (In reference to Audre Lorde)