The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A man who is a father to a daughter is different from one who is a father to a son. One is the left shoe and the other is the right. They are the same but not interchangeable.” (An American Marriage Quotes)
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
“A million dollars doesn’t make you rich-rich. Real rich people don’t have to earn their money. ”
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
“Break your own heart, or they will break it for you.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“But a man who is a father to a daughter is different from one who is a father to a son. One is the left shoe and the other is the right. They are the same but not interchangeable.”
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
“But how you feel love and understand love are two different things.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Even a dog can make a bunch of puppies, but a real man raises his kids.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Everything I do is a love letter addressed to you.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Gloria once told me that your best quality is also your worst.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Human emotion is beyond comprehension, smooth and uninterrupted, like an orb made of blown glass.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Human emotion is beyond comprehension, smooth and uninterrupted, like an orb made of blown glass.”
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 don’t believe that blood makes a family; kin is the circle you create, hands held tight.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“I hate using that word, career. It always feels like the word bitch is hiding out between the letters.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“I know who I married, too. You’re in me. When I touch you, your flesh communicates with my bones.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“I liked being stronger than she was, the way I could literally sweep her off her feet. She wouldn’t tell me either, but I know that she appreciated it, too.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“I never imagined myself to be the kind of woman who would find herself with both a husband and a fiancé.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“I respect his ambition; I had mine. But you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with a man who has something to prove.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“If you have a woman, you recognize when you have said the wrong thing. Somehow she rearranges the ions in the air and you can’t breathe as well.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“If you lose it every time he tries to come clean, you’re encouraging him to lie.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“If you’re going to be black and struggling, the United States is probably the best place to do it.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“In so many ways, you can’t choose what you give to your daughter, you just give her what you have.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“In the private library of my spirit, there is a dictionary of words that aren’t.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Innocent or not, prison changes you, makes you into a convict.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Is it love, or is it convenience?… She explained that connivance, habit, comfort, obligation- these are all things that wear the same clothing as love sometimes.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“It occurs to me that maybe a man can love his son only as much as he loves the mother.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“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
“It’s the magician’s manual that shows you how the tricks are done, not with sorcery but with careful cues and mysterious devices.”
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
“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
“Marriage is between two people. There is no studio audience.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Marriage is like grafting a limb onto a tree trunk. You have the limb, freshly sliced, dripping sap, and smelling of springtime, and then you have the mother tree stripped of her protective bark, gouged and ready to receive this new addition.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Maybe that’s what innocence is, having no way to predict the pain of the future.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Maybe that’s what it means to be in love, to willingly be at the mercy of another person.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Memory is a queer creature, an eccentric curator.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Much of life is timing and circumstance, I see that now.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“No man likes the rusty-butt who is laying up next to his daughter.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Nobody can really satisfy their mama when it comes to the ladies.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“One is the left shoe and the other is the right. They are the same but not interchangeable.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“She pulled away and walked to my bedroom and closed herself in with a little click of the knob. I could have pursued her. A paper clip could best the catch, but when a woman shuts you out, picking the lock won’t let you back in.”
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 the only thing that can cure a man is the inside of a woman, the right woman who does things the right way.”
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
“Somewhere it is written that your sins fall on your parents, mostly on your mother, until you’re twelve years old. After that, your trespasses are on your own scorecard.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Tell the truth. Don’t try to cushion the blow. If you’re bad enough to do it, you’re bad enough to tell it.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“That’s your fate as a black man. Carried by six or judged by twelve.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“The chilly rationale of hindsight is what exposes the how and why of something that once seemed supernatural. It’s the magician’s manual that shows you how the tricks are done, not with sorcery but with careful cues and mysterious devices.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“The vast generosity of women is a mysterious tunnel, and nobody knows where it leads. The writing on the walls spells out trick questions, and as a man, you must know that you cannot reason your way out.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“The way to make a bad matter worse with a southern woman is to refuse her food.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“There are too many loose ends in the world in need of knots. You can’t attend to all of them, but you have to try.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“There are too many loose ends in the world in need of knots.”
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
“There should be a word, I thought, for this experience when you’re surprised but at the same time the moment feels completely inevitable.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“There was comfort in the truth, no matter how difficult.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“This is how it is when you really have a baby. You ’ve your own angel.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Three takes you from being a couple to being a family, upping the consequences for walking away, upping the pleasure quotient for staying home.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“We have no secrets from God. He knows our feelings because He made them. When you confess your sins, He will bless you for your courage. He will bless you for your humility.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“We sat at that table, neither able to comfort the other, her remembering being a bystander to my mother’s suffering and me suffering because I was denied the experience.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“Well, somebody in your situation needs to look at life like a newborn baby. Pretend like you have never been in the world before and you’re waiting for it to show you what’s what. Keep your head in the right now.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“What happens to you doesn’t belong to you, only half concerns you. It’s not yours. Not yours only.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“What’s for you is for you. Extend your hand and claim your blessing.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“When a spectral voice says, get out, you should do it. But in real life, you don’t know that you’re in a scary movie.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“When a woman shuts you out, picking the lock won’t let you back in.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“When a woman tells you she is having your baby, your first mind is to get the hell out. It’s like if the house is on fire. You don’t think to escape, you just do. It’s human nature because you know she is asking you for your whole life. And a man don’t have but one life.”
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
“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.”
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
“You can never know another person’s mind; this is one thing I have learned.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“You can never really unlove somebody. Maybe it changes shape, but it’s there.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“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
“You don’t know how demoralizing it is to be a man with nothing to offer a woman.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“You don’t know what you need until somebody gives it to you exactly the way you need it gave.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
“You got to work with the god you were given. You also have to work with the love you are given, with all of the complications clanging behind it like tin cans tied to a bridal sedan.”
Tayari Jones
An American Marriage
