Silver Sparrow
Tayari Jones
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“People say, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you, doesn't kill you.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I knew by then that I would never have my mother back, not in the way I had known her all my life. When you have seen your mother shattered, there's no putting her back together. There will always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she will never be stronger than a cracked plate.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Silver” is what I called girls who were natural beauties but who also smoothed on a layer of pretty from a jar. It wasn’t just how they looked, it was how they were. The name came from a song my mother sang sometimes when she was getting dressed to go out somewhere special. She sang along with Aretha Franklin at the end: “Sail on, silver girl… Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way.”
“If there was ever a time to boil up some grits it is now.”
“I am neither religious nor superstitious, but there is something otherworldly about the space where two roads come together. The devil is said to set up shop there if you want to swap your soul for something more useful. If you believe that God can be bribed, it's also the hallowed ground to make sacrifices. In the literal sense, it's also a place to change direction, but once you've changed it, you're stuck until you come to another crossroads, and who knows how long that will be.”
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Book Keywords:
change, abandonment, the-humanity-of-man, life-lessons, grits
