Allegedly Tiffany Jackson Quotes

Hard to celebrate the day you were born when everybody seems to wish you were never born at all.

When people feel insecure, they create a grand self-image in an attempt to compensate for what is lacking internally. They present this façade to the world in order to hide the emptiness they feel, thus falling in love with the idea of themselves. But, if you threaten their self-image—threaten to expose the thing they love most, themselves—they will react, often in a hostile manner.

What yuh may or may not’ve done is not di definition of who yuh really are.

Most of my life, no one has bothered to explain anything to me. It’s been one “’cause I said so” scenario after another.

What does it mean when you love and hate someone at the same time?” I ask. He laughs. “It means they family.

Someone told me when you go to college, your life gets better. And you can escape what you were before and find who you’re supposed to be,

She went into crisis management mode, much like the adult she has been forced to be for most of her life, continuing to hide and protect her mother, because in Mary’s mind she is the mother, and her mother is the child. And a mother always protects her child.

And then my whole universe had opened up and he became my sun.

You ever smell a newborn? It's so different...just new. They're like these tiny, brand-new humans that don't know who you are, or what you've done, or anything. But they love you anyways.

I'd kill for something, anything new to read. But I'd never say anything like that at all. Figures of speech are luxurious convicted murders are not allowed to have

That’s the only advice Momma ever really gave me. Keep praying. God will work everything out. It never occurred to her that maybe she should try to work some things out for herself. Sometimes I wanted to shout, “God’s a little busy, Momma! He can’t find your keys for you all the time!” She was always lazy like that, expecting everyone else to everything for her. God and I share the same problem.

Being a chronic unwanted guest can really suck.

The group home is always muggy, like we live in an old shoe, smelling like corn chips mixed with roach spray. I never call the group home “home.” It’s not a home. No house where you fear for your life can be considered a home.

Everyone in the house knows what I did. Or thinks they know what I did. No one asks though because no one really wants to hear how I killed a baby. They don’t even want to know why I killed a baby. They just want to pretend they know for knowing’s sake.

Understand, there’s a big difference between baby jail and juvie, where the rest of the girls in the house come from. Juvie is for badass kids who do stuff like rob bodegas, steal cars, maybe stupidly try to kill someone. Baby jail is for kids who’ve done way worse, like me.

I look around the room. A group of girls, a rainbow of colors, all in for different crime, but somehow we all look the same. We have something in common: we're all too broken to be fixed.

sleep,

But I’m only the weakest part of angry; I’m hurt. Hurt makes you want to lay in the middle of the street, dead on the ground, muscles gone limp. It’s an SAT word I think: lethargic - Mary, pg 203