Jackie Kay Quotes

“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.”

— Jackie Kay

“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.”

— Jackie Kay

“My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That's what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation.”

— Jackie Kay

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

— Jackie Kay

“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.”

— Jackie Kay

When it rains like that, dark in the afternoon, you feel like you've been taken into the past.

— Jackie Kay

“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?”

— Jackie Kay

“They never tell you about that either. How the hardest thing a mother has to do is give her child up, let them go, watch them run.”

— Jackie Kay

“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.”

— Jackie Kay

You noticed things. You're not sure when you start. It's only when you've noticed - noticed that you know you've noticed. Maybe between the first time when you're staring to think, Is this what I think it is? and the second time when you think, Yes, between those two times, there's a silence. A pause.

— Jackie Kay

“She was in love. There was no turning back.”

— Jackie Kay

“During this period I feel as if some part of myself has been banished to another part of the world.I feel as if I cannot live my life to the full and feel everything I'm capable of feeling unless I have this love. The pleasure goes from me; the delight goes. Nothing means anything.”

— Jackie Kay

“You cannot penalize a man for one slip. Then she lay wondering about the word slip. When you slip, you fall, but maybe it is not such a sore fall because you have slipped.”

— Jackie Kay

“Make sure that the very different colors go next to each other so it looks deliberate. You don't want to look as if you've just run out of colour and gone for the next nearest thing.”

— Jackie Kay

“Life is too short to argue about time.”

— Jackie Kay

“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”

— Jackie Kay

“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.”

— Jackie Kay

“Do things in your own time. Everybody should like how they choose. We never know what goes behind the blinds.”

— Jackie Kay

“In my head maybe it was a test of love, because there are things about illness which I find revolting.”

— Jackie Kay

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

— Jackie Kay

We're not alive to be alone on the planet. We're alive to share, to eat together and love together and laugh together and cry together. If you can never love because you will always lose, what reason is there to live?

— Jackie Kay

“The sound of his sleep, the snores and sighs and small noices, is company.”

— Jackie Kay

“What a thing it is to have music that plays your terrible thoughts. I imagined that one piece could drive more delicate women than myself to insanity.”

— Jackie Kay

“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.”

— Jackie Kay

“(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.”

— Jackie Kay

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

— Jackie Kay

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.

— Jackie Kay

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

— Jackie Kay