Jackie Kay Quotes

Poet

Jackie Kay is a Scottish poet, novelist, and playwright. Known for her distinctive voice and exploration of identity, gender, and culture, her work encompasses personal experiences, history, and contemporary social issues.

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All Alive Feels Home Ifs Looks Absence Audre Lorde Beautiful Bedroom Birth

Famous Jackie Kay Quotes

“The tall trees, compassionate, understood everything: grief - they stood stock-still, branches drooped in despair; fear - they exposed their many roots, tugged their gold hair; anger - they shook in the storm, pointed their bony fingers. - The World of Trees (inspired by the Forest of Burnley)”

Feelings Nature Emotion Tree Trees Forest

Book:Red, Cherry Red

Source: Red, Cherry Red

“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?”

Madness

Book:Wish I Was Here

Source: Wish I Was Here

“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.”

Men Slip

Book:Wish I Was Here

Source: 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.”

Loneliness Self Discovery

Book:Wish I Was Here

Source: Wish I Was Here

“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.”

Beautiful

Book:Wish I Was Here

Source: Wish I Was Here

“Writers give readers courage – the courage to be utterly your complete and complex self. (In reference to Audre Lorde)”

Inspiration Writers Self Acceptance Audre Lorde

Author: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.”

Parents Phobias

Book:Trumpet

Source: Trumpet

“I remember watching my grandmother build her fire, the honest kindling, the twisted newspaper, the tiny tower of good black coal. And how, once lit, she'd hold a sheet of newspaper across the fire and say, 'watch it suck, dear'. - An Old Woman's Fire”

Fire Memory Nostalgia Grandmother

Book:Red, Cherry Red

Source: Red, Cherry Red

“Life, he told me, was like a fork of lightning. He could see exactly where one decision violently parted company with another and a new future flared up before him.”

Life Decision Decisions

Book:Trumpet

Source: Trumpet

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

Blinds Own Time

Book:Wish I Was Here

Source: Wish I Was Here

“Nick Makoha’s Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree Press) is a bold and brilliant poetry debut that does not avert its gaze from trauma and atrocity (exploring along the way the brutal rule of Idi Amin and the civil war) and yet is light on its feet and fills you with hope. The Guardian”

The Guardian Kingdom Of Gravity

Author:Jackie Kay

“Some men fall in love with a woman, Some women fall in love with a man, Some men fall in love with another man, Some women fall in love with another woman - But I, my dear one, fell in love with Shetland. - Shetland”

Love Scotland Place Shetland

Book:Red, Cherry Red

Source: Red, Cherry Red

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

Sleep Company Relationship

Book:Wish I Was Here

Source: Wish I Was Here

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

Feels I Can These Days

Book:Darling: New & Selected Poems

Source: Darling: New & Selected Poems

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

Sometimes Remember Taken Photograph

Book:Trumpet: Picador Classic

Source: Trumpet: Picador Classic

“(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.”

Ifs Want Years Looks Littles Home Might Mother Choices Wonder Laughing Sun Mines Flower Birth Direct Window Meetings Bunch Coincidence Genetics Spray Orchids Live For The Day Birth Mother

Author: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.”

Ifs Way Feels Has Beens Different Home Death Gone Land Dying Crosses Borders Going Home

Book:Red Dust Road

Source: Red Dust Road

“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.”

World Past Girl Lost Memories Alive Color Like You Bedroom Vivid Our Memories Recollection Blazing Underwater Submerged Past Memories

Book:Red Dust Road: Picador Classic

Source: Red Dust Road: Picador Classic

“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.”

Doe Stills Problem Dies Alive Love Your Life

Book:Trumpet: Picador Classic

Source: Trumpet: Picador Classic

“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.”

Looks Next Strong Loss Strange Fit Absence

Book:Trumpet: Picador Classic

Source: Trumpet: Picador Classic

About the Author

Born: November 9, 1961
Known for: Poet
Quotes: 20

Books & Sources

Wish I Was HereRelated source material

Red, Cherry RedRelated source material

Trumpet: Picador ClassicRelated source material

TrumpetRelated source material

Darling: New & Selected PoemsRelated source material

Red Dust RoadRelated source material

Red Dust Road: Picador ClassicRelated source material

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