Trumpet By Jackie Kay Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Weather here in this part of the world is just as moody, just as subjective and disloyal, as people.

Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence.

The terrible thing about pain is that it doesn't matter, it still hurts. It hurts like hell.

I know I am capable of loving to the full capacity, of not being frightened of loving too much, of giving myself up and over

Time feels as if it is on the other side of me now, way over, out across the sea, like another country. I don’t live inside it any more and it doesn’t rule me.

The heat comes off the music.

More than anything else, more than your body, or the food you eat, you are your teeth. Life is a journey from milk teeth to false teeth with fillings and crowns thrown in in between for relief.

I am lying to myself. I am always lying to myself and I really must stop it. I am alone. My friends don’t know how to talk to me or write to me any more

Animals are luckier; they can bury their heads in sand, hide under their coats, pretend to have no head at all.

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.