“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“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“When it rains like that, dark in the afternoon, you feel like you've been taken into the past.”
Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here“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, Wish I Was Here“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, Wish I Was Here“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, Trumpet“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, Wish I Was Here“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, Trumpet“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, Wish I Was Here“I've started to feel very odd within my own life. It's most peculiar to feel lonely inside your own life.”
Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here“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, Wish I Was Here