Top 100 Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.
Jacqueline Woodson
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. The Bible is big in the religion, treating people as you want to be treated.
Jacqueline Woodson
#6. No one stops to think, though - that maybe there is a reason for the darkness. Maybe people have to be reminded of it - of its power. At night, we go to sleep against the darkness. And if we wake up before morning, a lot of times we're afraid. We need it all though - the darkness and the light.
Jacqueline Woodson
#7. My sister's clear soft voice opens up the world to me. I lean in so hungry for it.
Jacqueline Woodson
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.
Jacqueline Woodson
#13. I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.
Jacqueline Woodson
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#19. 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
#20. Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone - adults promising us their own failed future.
Jacqueline Woodson
#21. We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico.
Jacqueline Woodson
#22. Nothing in the world is like this-
a bright white page with
pale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencil
the soft hush of it
moving finally
one day
into letters.
Jacqueline Woodson
#24. You're a part of me ... You're in my heart. Forever and always, all right?
- D
Jacqueline Woodson
#25. When there are many worlds
you can choose the one
you walk into each day.
Jacqueline Woodson
#26. 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
#27. But on paper, things can live forever.
On paper, a butterfly
never dies.
Jacqueline Woodson
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Everyone else
has gone away.
And now coming back home
isn't really coming back home at all.
Jacqueline Woodson
#31. 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
#32. I think I'd rather have my heart broke than do the breaking.
- Lena
Jacqueline Woodson
#33. Someday somebody's going to come along and knock this old fence down.
Jacqueline Woodson
#34. This is the way brown people have to fight, my grandfather says. You can't just put your fist up. You have to insist on something gently. Walk toward a thing slowly. But be ready to die, my grandfather says, for what is right. Be ready to die, my grandfather says, for everything you believe in.
Jacqueline Woodson
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.
Jacqueline Woodson
#38. 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
#39. I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.
Jacqueline Woodson
#41. 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
#42. But I don't want to read faster or older or any way else that might make the story disappear too quickly from where it's settling inside my brain, slowly becoming a part of me. A story I will remember long after I've read it for the second, third, tenth, hundredth time.
Jacqueline Woodson
#43. 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
#44. People are going to judge you all the time no matter what you do ... Don't worry about other people. Worry about you.
Jacqueline Woodson
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Will the words end, I ask
whenever I remember to.
Nope, my sister says, all of five years old now,
and promising me
infinity.
Jacqueline Woodson
#49. That's all anybody is-themselves. People all the time wanting to change that.
Jacqueline Woodson
#50. We don't know to be sad, the weight of our grandparents' love like a blanket with us beneath it, safe and warm.
Jacqueline Woodson
#51. 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
#52. I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise,
Jacqueline Woodson
#53. I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.
Jacqueline Woodson
#54. 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
#55. Sometimes ... you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.
Jacqueline Woodson
#56. No matter how big you get, it's still okay to cry because everybody's got a right to their own tears.
Jacqueline Woodson
#57. When my mother comes home from the hospital with me, my older brother takes one look inside the pink blanket, says, Take her back. We already have one of those. Already
Jacqueline Woodson
#58. 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
#59. Sometimes you do have to laugh to keep from crying. And sometimes the world feels all right and good and kind of like it's becoming nice again around you. And you realize it, and realize how happy you are in it, and you just gotta laugh.
Jacqueline Woodson
#60. 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
#61. I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called Now.
Jacqueline Woodson
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Everything and everyone seemed like it was part of a long-ago time - when I was young and free and living.
Jacqueline Woodson
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. If I loved someone enough, I would go anywhere in the world with them.
- Staggerlee
Jacqueline Woodson
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.
Jacqueline Woodson
#72. Mama says it's okay to be on the quiet side - if quiet means you're listening, watching, taking it all in.
Jacqueline Woodson
#73. 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
#74. I want to catch words one day. I want to hold them then blow gently, watch them float right out of my hands.
Jacqueline Woodson
#75. I would never trust her. Not one hundred percent. Not the way some people can trust their mothers.
Jacqueline Woodson
#76. Probably still believed that if you wished hard enough you could make the impossible happen.
Jacqueline Woodson
#77. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Wasn't afraid of dying because dying had always been somewhere in our house, somewhere so close, we could feel the wind of it on our cheeks.
Jacqueline Woodson
#82. Racism doesn't know color, death doesn't know age, and pain doesn't know might.
Jacqueline Woodson
#83. 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
#84. I work hard, he says, I treat people like I want to be treated. God sees this, God knows.
Jacqueline Woodson
#85. I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.
Jacqueline Woodson
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. They're all inside of us, ... past people and present people. And probably even the people we'll become.
Jacqueline Woodson
#91. Do you remember?'
Someone's always asking and
someone else, always does
Jacqueline Woodson
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
Jacqueline Woodson
#96. This is what kindness does, Ms.Albert said. Each little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world.
Jacqueline Woodson
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. I do know that as the novel takes shape on the page, it's hard for characters' lives not to intersect with the writer's own life. As we unpack our characters' stories and actions, it's hard not to unpack our own history.
Jacqueline Woodson
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