Naomi Jackson Quotes

#1. What she most liked about their friendship was how much space there was for silence[.]

Naomi Jackson

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

Naomi Jackson

#3. Learn to see past the face people show you.

Naomi Jackson

#4. 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

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

Naomi Jackson

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

Naomi Jackson

#7. Who don't listen, feels.

Naomi Jackson

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. [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