Top 48 Jesmyn Quotes
#1. I knew that I lived in a place where hope and a sense of possibility were as ephemeral as morning fog, but I did not see the despair at the heart of our drug use.
Jesmyn Ward
#2. I can see her, chin to chest, straining to push Junior out, and Junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try to stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born.
Jesmyn Ward
#3. Demond's family history wasn't so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?
Jesmyn Ward
#4. The air that had been still before swoops and tunnels through the clearing, raising dust, making the boys close their eyes. Maybe Daddy is right; maybe Katrina is coming for us.
Jesmyn Ward
#6. To give life...is to know what's worth fighting for. And what's love.
Jesmyn Ward
#7. And then she would put her hand over the bird's face like she was hiding it from seeing something, and then she would grab and twist. Break the neck. Slice the head off on the stump.
Jesmyn Ward
#8. I'm still ashamed that I did not step out of that dense grass, that I did not climb those steps and grab his hand and lead him down them as an elder sister should, that I did not say: Here I am, brother. I'm here.
Jesmyn Ward
#10. The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow up our playground.
Jesmyn Ward
#11. That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.
Jesmyn Ward
#12. It is the way that all girls who only know one boy move. Centered as if the love that boy feels for them anchors them deep as a tree's roots, holds them still as the oaks, which don't uproot in hurricane wind. Love as certainty.
Jesmyn Ward
#13. My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a lot of her friends, and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren't.
Jesmyn Ward
#14. We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were still alive even as we did everything to die.
Jesmyn Ward
#15. In every one of the Greeks' mythology tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman, or a woman chasing a man. There is never a meeting in the middle.
Jesmyn Ward
#16. Jesmyn Ward returns to the world of her first two books, but here in the mode of non-fiction. A clear-eyed witness to the harrowing stories of 'men we reaped,' she quickens the dead and brings them, vividly alive again. An eloquent, grief-steeped account.
Nicholas Delbanco
#17. I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.
Jesmyn Ward
#18. I will not let him see until none of us have any choices about what can be seen, what can be avoided, what is blind, and what will turn us to stone.
Jesmyn Ward
#19. And I get up because it is the only thing I can do.
Jesmyn Ward
#20. My voice sounds like I have a cold, all the mucus from my crying lodged in my nose. A train, Mama said. Camille came, and the wind sounded like trains.
Jesmyn Ward
#21. While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.
Jesmyn Ward
#22. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless.
Jesmyn Ward
#23. Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was.
Jesmyn Ward
#24. Love don't just go away like that, Cille," Sandman said.
"It do.
Jesmyn Ward
#25. When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls who in some ways are outsiders.
Jesmyn Ward
#26. I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.
Jesmyn Ward
#27. Replace ropes with bullets. Hound dogs with German shepherds. A gray uniform with a bulletproof vest. Nothing is new.
Jesmyn Ward
#28. Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
Jesmyn Ward
#29. I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
Jesmyn Ward
#30. I didn't want them to look at me after saying something about Black people, didn't want to have to avert my eyes so they didn't see me studying them, studying the entitlement they wore like another piece of clothing.
Jesmyn Ward
#31. My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.
Jesmyn Ward
#32. By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.
Jesmyn Ward
#33. I read the last Harry Potter, and I cried for at least the last 70 pages. Awful! I was curled into a ball and I just kept sobbing. It was embarrassing. I was loud, and I just kept wiping tears away so I could see the page.
Jesmyn Ward
#34. It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'
Jesmyn Ward
#35. When people ask me about my hometown, I tell them it was called after a wolf before it was partially tamed and settled.
Jesmyn Ward
#36. There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private.
Jesmyn Ward
#37. Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.
Jesmyn Ward
#38. When I read 'Absalom, Absalom!,' I remember being really excited about it and telling all my friends they had to read it, especially my writer friends.
Jesmyn Ward
#39. I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn't dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.
Jesmyn Ward
#40. If the scrapes were on the front of our knees, she would put our dirty feet in the middle of her chest to clean the wounds, and we could feel her heart beating, strong as the thud of the ground when we walked, through our soles.
Jesmyn Ward
#42. But I am not that eloquent, so I shut my mouth and smile.
Jesmyn Ward
#43. Men's bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend he circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural.
Jesmyn Ward
#44. I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren't.
Jesmyn Ward
#45. And it was easier to let him keep on touching me than ask him to stop, easier to let him inside than to push him away, easier than hearing him ask me, "Why not?" It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer.
Jesmyn Ward
#46. Christophe peeled the shrimp slowly and carefully: that was his way around her, and it was the exact opposite of his usual demeanor. She knew it for what it was: love.
Jesmyn Ward
#47. I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.
Jesmyn Ward
#48. Did every step feel like the running leap a bird takes before flight?
Jesmyn Ward
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