Tayari Quotes

#1. 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.

Tayari Jones

#2. I do have a sister - I have two sisters.

Tayari Jones

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

Tayari Jones

#4. She went about her business in a way that put me in mind of an old matchbook. You can scratch the head against the strip in the same way you always have but you are not going to get any kind of spark.

Tayari Jones

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

Tayari Jones

#6. Love is a maze. Once you get in it, you're pretty much trapped. Maybe you manage to claw your way out, but then what have you accomplished?

Tayari Jones

#7. Remember that the writing itself is good for you. If your story is so close to home that you are afraid to write it, it probably means you need to write it.

Tayari Jones

#8. He's your father, but first he is a man. A man is just a man, and that's all we have to wok with.

Tayari Jones

#9. Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.

Tayari Jones

#10. 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.

Tayari Jones

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

Tayari Jones

#12. Marriage is complicated.

Tayari Jones

#13. Life is full of things you never figured on.

Tayari Jones

#14. But I lived in a world where you could never want what you wanted out in the open.

Tayari Jones

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

Tayari Jones

#16. 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.

Tayari Jones

#17. He says he can't see why I didn't "just" tell the truth. but the truth is denser than he can imagine, yet it's more delicate than my body; it's more complicated than any love that ever passed between the two of us.

Tayari Jones

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

Tayari Jones

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

Tayari Jones

#20. 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.

Tayari Jones

#21. What right did my father have to the details of my life? He squandered his chance to be the protective father. You can't come rushing to the rescue six months later. I wasn't a person to be saved only when it was a convenient time to swoop in.

Tayari Jones

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

Tayari Jones

#23. 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.

Tayari Jones

#24. ...and I wondered what it felt like to live inside such disloyal skin.

Tayari Jones

#25. Living here, you don't know anything about white people. Where I'm from, everything is mixed. In Atlanta, at least out here where we stay at, everything is so black that y'all don't know what it feels like to be black.

Tayari Jones

#26. Dwayne is right: blood does call to blood. I was always waiting for hers to beckon to mine, but I never considered that it would be my blood that would call upon hers.

Tayari Jones

#27. 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.

Tayari Jones

#28. The bitter scratch of his unshaven good-night kiss will always, for me, be the sensation of grief.

Tayari Jones

#29. Our past is never past & there is no such thing as moving on...

Tayari Jones

#30. 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.

Tayari Jones

#31. 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.

Tayari Jones

#32. On the radio Smokey Robinson complained that a taste of honey is worse than none at all.

Tayari Jones

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

Tayari Jones

#34. 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.

Tayari Jones

#35. Although Hermione is right about a great many things, she was wrong about the nature of things gone by. 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.

Tayari Jones

#36. I wanted to live in a house with walls painted in various shades of blue and green, instead of the eggshell hue that screamed renter.

Tayari Jones

#37. If there was ever a time to boil up some grits it is now.

Tayari Jones

#38. The key to life," he told me once, "is to avoid the highs and the lows. It's the peaks and valleys that mess you up.

Tayari Jones

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

Tayari Jones