Jackie Kay

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.