Top 100 Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

#1. Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #6667
#2. I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much ... so, so much.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #14298
#3. From a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for the deep understanding of the literature; not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #26516
#4. The Bible is big in the religion, treating people as you want to be treated.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #29402
#5. Mama was always saying I was a brain snob, that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #113175
#6. we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn. August,

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #150640
#7. I watched my brother watch the world, his sharp, too-serious brow furrowing down in both angst and wonder. Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #164836
#8. There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #170369
#9. I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #180507
#10. It seemed like someone was always leaving someone, like that's the way the world worked - people were born and people died, people left and people came. It was like the world was saying you can't have everything you want at the same time.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #183208
#11. So this is what he believes in
your hands in the cool dirt
until the earth gives back to you
all that you've asked of it.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #210066
#12. Even when my girls were little, we'd go down there, my grandmother tells us. And people'd be marching. The marching didn't just start yesterday. Police with those dogs, scared everybody near to death. Just once I let my girls march.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #230471
#13. The empty swing set reminds us of this
that bad won't be bad forever,
and what is good can sometimes last
a long, long time.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #234226
#14. I feel like the world stopped. And I got off ... and then it started spinning again, but too fast for me to hop back on. I feel like I'm still trying to get a ... to get some kind of foothold on living

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #259836
#15. Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone - adults promising us their own failed future.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #292251
#16. We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #311221
#17. know now that what is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #359404
#18. You're a part of me ... You're in my heart. Forever and always, all right?
- D

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #380477
#19. When there are many worlds
you can choose the one
you walk into each day.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #386314
#20. The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #391031
#21. Y'all know how much I love you? "Infinity and back again," I say the way I've said it a million times. And then, daddy says to me, "go on and add a little bit more to that.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #406651
#22. May, I am thinking, there is something hidden like this in all of us. A small gift from the universe waiting to be discovered. (233)

Even the silence has a story to tell you. Just listen. Listen. (278)

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #410547
#23. Everyone else
has gone away.
And now coming back home
isn't really coming back home at all.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #415080
#24. Maybe, I am thinking, there is something hidden like this, in all of us. A small gift from the universe waiting to be discovered.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #438060
#25. I think I'd rather have my heart broke than do the breaking.
- Lena

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #462342
#26. Someday somebody's going to come along and knock this old fence down.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #504252
#27. How can I explain to anyone that stories are like air to me, I breathe them in and let them out over and over again.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #563989
#28. To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #571706
#29. You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #580784
#30. It's easier to make up stories
than it is to write them down. When I speak, the words come pouring out of me. The story
wakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair, crosses one leg over the other, says,
Let me introduce myself. Then just starts going on and on.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #594528
#31. She said she was going to live-that tomorrow wasn't guaranteed.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #644983
#32. If someone had taken that book out of my hand said, You're too old for this maybe I'd never have believed that someone who looked like me could be in the pages of the book that someone who looked like me had a story.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #666830
#33. We all have the same dream, my grandmother says. To live equal in a country that's supposed to be the land of the free. She lets out a long breath, deep remembering.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #680853
#34. When I took these things from the house:
some tapes, some books, my winter clothes,
I did not know that these would become the
things I own.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #685972
#35. But it's what the world does to people. It makes some of us feel ugly and it makes some of us look like criminals, like angry fools.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #689160
#36. I don't know," he said softly. "I look into the future and I don't see anything else. It's like it's this big blank space where I should be.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #689884
#37. My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #748241
#38. I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise,

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #766027
#39. I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #778048
#40. I lifted my head to look up into the changing leaves, thinking how at some point, we were all headed home. At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #794193
#41. No matter how big you get, it's still okay to cry because everybody's got a right to their own tears.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #842640
#42. I definitely believe in a greater good. I definitely believe that there's a reason each of us is here and that we've been brought here to do something. And we need to get busy doing it. And I definitely believe that there is something moving us forward that's good.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #874298
#43. You can't have too many books featuring people of color, just like you can't have too many books featuring white people.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #889313
#44. I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called Now.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #893232
#45. Our baby brother, Roman, was born pale as dust. His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop people on the street.
Whose angel child is this? they want to know. When I say, My brother, the people wear doubt
thick as a cape
until we smile
and the cape falls.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #899314
#46. I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone?

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #913443
#47. Everything and everyone seemed like it was part of a long-ago time - when I was young and free and living.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #916878
#48. I do not know if these hands will become Malcolm's - raised and fisted or Martin's - open and asking or James's - curled around a pen. I do not know if these hands will be Rosa's or Ruby's gently gloved and fiercely folded calmly in a lap, on a desk, around a book, ready to change the world . . .

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #923079
#49. And when we pressed our heads to each other's hearts how did we not hear Carmen McRae singing? In Angela's fisted hands, Billie Holiday staggered past us and we didn't know her name. Nina Simone told us how beautiful we were and we didn't hear her voice.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #947272
#50. Lately, I'd been feeling like I was standing outside watching everything and everybody. Wishing I could take the part of me that was over there and the part of me that was over here and push them together - make myself into one whole person like everybody else.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #973298
#51. If I loved someone enough, I would go anywhere in the world with them.
- Staggerlee

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1024274
#52. When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1029576
#53. My whole family knows I can't sing. My voice, my sister says, is just left of the key. Just right of the tune. But I sing anyway, whenever I can.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1034482
#54. Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1037577
#55. Mama says it's okay to be on the quiet side - if quiet means you're listening, watching, taking it all in.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1040196
#56. What did it sound like ... having someone call your name across a crowded school yard? How did it feel to turn to the sound of your name, to see some smiling face or waving hand and know it was for you and you alone?
- Staggerlee

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1052116
#57. Probably still believed that if you wished hard enough you could make the impossible happen.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1110518
#58. I think only once in your life do you find someone that you say, "Hey, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my time on this earth with." And if you miss it, or walk away from it, or even maybe, blink - it's gone.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1167711
#59. And when I can't speak it, I write it down. I wish I was different. Wish I was taller, smarter, could talk out loud the way I write things down. I wish I didn't always feel like I was on the outside, looking in like a Peeping Tom.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1186905
#60. Feels like I've known him since before he got to the world - longer than he knew himself, truthfully. Seems like we'd been friends really ... Somewhere before life on earth ...

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1239524
#61. Racism doesn't know color, death doesn't know age, and pain doesn't know might.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1284504
#62. Imagine, my brother signed. Imagine if somebody built a bridge right outside our window and we could just walk across the highway and be on the other side.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1290997
#63. I work hard, he says, I treat people like I want to be treated. God sees this, God knows.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1293936
#64. I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1303709
#65. Sometimes, I don't know that words for things,
how to write down the feeling of knowing
that every dying person leaves something behind.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1335460
#66. And I can't help thinking of the birds here - how they disappear in the wintertime, heading south for food and warmth and shelter. Heading south to stay alive . . . passing us on the way

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1343444
#67. They're all inside of us, ... past people and present people. And probably even the people we'll become.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1359077
#68. No past. No future. Just this perfect Now.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1367580
#69. Do you remember?'
Someone's always asking and
someone else, always does

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1369937
#70. Then I let the stories live
inside my head, again and again
until the real world fades back
into cricket lullabies
and my own dreams.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1384718
#71. For God so loved the world, their father would say, he gave his only begotten son. But what about his daughters, I wondered. What did God do with his daughters?

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1389387
#72. The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1403623
#73. This is what kindness does, Ms.Albert said. Each little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1408224
#74. I'm gonna kiss you in each room," he said. "Then it's dinnertime."
"How many rooms to this place?" Ellie asked, her eyes wide.
Miah shrugged. "I'm not counting.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1455333
#75. There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death's enormity.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1470792
#76. Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1503406
#77. And sometimes,' Anne said softly, 'there's just plain love, Ellie. no reason for it, no need to explain'
Then she leaned back on the couch, crossed her ankle over her knee and grinned. 'Perfect love,' she said.
'And what's that like?'
'When you find it, lil sis. You'll know.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1542453
#78. Sometimes people don't get a chance to say good-bye, Stag.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1567881
#79. I'm not afraid of silence. You know, I'm not afraid to sit in a room and have the conversation drop into silence. I think that's a very southern thing.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1570739
#80. That's what makes best friends. It's not whether or not you live on the same block or go to the same school, but how you feel about each other in your hearts.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1571453
#81. I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame - of everything.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1584538
#82. Seems like every time life starts straightening itself out, something's gotta go and happen.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1609057
#83. My mamma says I shouldn't go on the other side ... My mama says the same thing. But she never said nothing about sitting on it

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1621639
#84. Write down what I think I know. The knowing will come.
Just keep listening ...

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1628169
#85. Orba (feminine), the Latin word for orphaned, parentless, childless, widowed. There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death's enormity. But it has. Orbus, orba, orbum, orbi, orbae, orborum, orbo, orbis...

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1648568
#86. Life ... moves us through all the time changes. All kinds of changes. And we're made so that we roll and move with it. Sometimes somebody gets stuck in the present and the rolling stops - but the changing doesn't.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1664419
#87. That's good. Always take the time. You really never know when you're not going to have it anymore.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1693258
#88. And freedom? Oh, freedom.
Well that's just some people talking.
Your prison is walking through this world all alone.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1702759
#89. If you come as softly
as the wind within the trees.
You may hear what I hear.
See what sorrow sees.
If you come as lightly
as threading dew,
I will take you gladly,
nor ask more of you.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1706454
#90. In all your getting, get understanding.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1745847
#91. I have all this stuff - all these thoughts going on inside me and they all seem so - so dangerous.
- Tyler

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1756481
#92. Maybe this was our last summer as best friends. I feel like something's going to change now and I'm not going to be able to change it back.
- Margaret

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1763363
#93. First book There are seven of them, haikus mostly but rhyming ones, too. Not enough for a real book until I cut each page into a small square staple the squares together, write one poem on each page. Butterflies by Jacqueline Woodson on the front. The butterfly book complete now.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1778237
#94. Fifteen. Sixteen was probably something, but fifteen - fifteen was a place between here and nowhere.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1806470
#95. Kids are something. All they can see is the beauty in a moment.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1811284
#96. You have those walls up all around you ... Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1813220
#97. My mother has a gap between
her two front teeth. So does Daddy Gunnar.
Each child in this family has the same space
connecting us.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1833415
#98. And it's not even strange that it feels the way it's always felt like the place we belong to. Like home.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1843601
#99. Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies?

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1848653
#100. The Hocking River moves like a flowing arm away from the Ohio River runs through towns as though it's chasing its own freedom, the same way the Ohio runs north from Virginia until it's safely away from the South.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson Quotes #1873754

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