Tayari Jones > Quotes

“But home isn't where you land; home is where you launch. You can't pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Much of life is timing and circumstance, I see that now.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“There should be a word for this, the way it feels to steal something that’s already yours.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“But how you feel love and understand love are two different things.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Sometimes it's exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I've lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn't kill me then and will not kill me now. But this what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn't simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it's gone, nothing is whole again.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Sometimes when you like where you end up, you don’t care how you got there.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“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.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“There are too many loose ends in the world in need of knots.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“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

“One is the left shoe and the other is the right. They are the same but not interchangeable.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“I don’t believe that blood makes a family; kin is the circle you create, hands held tight.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“I'm alone in a way that's more than the fact that I am the only living person within these walls. Up until now, I thought I knew what was and wasn't possible. Maybe that's what innocence is, having no way to predict the pain of the future. When something happens that eclipses the imaginable, it changes a person. It's like the difference between a raw egg and a scrambled egg. It's the same thing, but it's not the same at all. That's the best way I can put it. I look in the mirror and I know it's me, but I can't quite recognize myself.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Marriage is between two people. There is no studio audience.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“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.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“You can never really unlove somebody. Maybe it changes shape, but it’s there.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“A marriage is more than your heart, it's your life. And we are not sharing ours.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“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, Silver Sparrow

“It was a wonderful feeling to be grown and yet young. To be married but not settled. To be tied down yet free.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Gloria once told me that your best quality is also your worst.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Love is the enemy of sound judgment, and occasionally this is in service of the good.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“I thought of Walter again. “Six or twelve,” he sometimes said when he was depressed, which wasn’t all the time but often enough that I recognized a blue mood when it was settling in. “That’s your fate as a black man. Carried by six or judged by twelve.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“When I was mad, I didn’t raise my voice. Instead, I lowered it to a register that you heard with your bones, not your ears.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“People say, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you, doesn't kill you.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“Everything I do is a love letter addressed to you.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“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.”
― Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

“If you lose it every time he tries to come clean, you’re encouraging him to lie.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“But home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Yesterday I sat under the hickory tree in the front yard. It's the only place where I find rest and just feel fine. I know fine isn't a lot, but it's rare for me these days. Even when I'm happy, there is something in between me and whatever good news comes my way. It's like eating a butterscotch still sealed in the wrapper.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“Break your own heart, or they will break it for you.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

“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.”
― Tayari Jones, An American Marriage