Best 8 quotes of Naomi Jackson on MyQuotes

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.

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.

[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.

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.

One day you will see that what must be born will be born. Everything else will find another way.

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.

She wore her body like a mistake she hoped to one day be forgiven for.

[T]he only thing that has power over you is what you can't say, even to yourself.