Top 100 Woodson Quotes
#1. Even Rod Woodson will tell you his best year he had as a professional was when he was 36 years old. If you think about why, you're much wiser.
Ray Lewis
#2. Jack Woodson is currently living and working in Dallas, TX. He has forty children, and all of them have different mothers.
John Pearson
#3. In a time when, as Woodson puts it, 'book sales trump the quality of ideas...
Joseph A. Tainter
#4. 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
#5. Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.
Jacqueline Woodson
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. The Bible is big in the religion, treating people as you want to be treated.
Jacqueline Woodson
#9. 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
#10. My sister's clear soft voice opens up the world to me. I lean in so hungry for it.
Jacqueline Woodson
#11. No people can go forward when the majority of those who should know better have chosen to go backward, but this is exactly what most of our misleaders do.
Carter G. Woodson
#12. And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.
Carter G. Woodson
#13. In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.
Carter G. Woodson
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. The only question which concerns us here is whether these "educated" persons are actually equipped to face the ordeal before them or unconsciously contribute to their own undoing by perpetuating the regime of the oppressor.
Carter G. Woodson
#19. There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.
Jacqueline Woodson
#20. I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.
Jacqueline Woodson
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The author takes the position that the consumer pays the tax, and as such every individual of the social order should be given unlimited opportunity to make the most of himself.
Carter G. Woodson
#27. The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.
Carter G. Woodson
#28. 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
#29. Our aim is to appeal to reason. ... Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer nothing more than a fervent wish; consequently the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is.
Carter G. Woodson
#30. History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.
Carter G. Woodson
#31. Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone - adults promising us their own failed future.
Jacqueline Woodson
#32. It may be well to repeat here the saying that old men talk of what they have done, young men of what they are doing, and fools of what they expect to do. The Negro race has a rather large share of the last mentioned class.
Carter G. Woodson
#33. We have a wonderful history behind us ... If you are unable to demonstrate to the world that you have this record, the world will say to you, 'You are not worthy to enjoy the blessings of democracy or anything else'.
Carter G. Woodson
#34. We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico.
Jacqueline Woodson
#35. 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
#36. Some of the American whites, moreover, are just as far behind in this respect as are the Negroes who have had less opportunity to learn better.
Carter G. Woodson
#38. This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.
Carter G. Woodson
#39. Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?
Carter G. Woodson
#40. You're a part of me ... You're in my heart. Forever and always, all right?
- D
Jacqueline Woodson
#41. This crusade is much more important than the anti- lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.
Carter G. Woodson
#42. When there are many worlds
you can choose the one
you walk into each day.
Jacqueline Woodson
#43. 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
#44. But on paper, things can live forever.
On paper, a butterfly
never dies.
Jacqueline Woodson
#45. 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
#46. To handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills one's aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime.
Carter G. Woodson
#47. 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
#48. Everyone else
has gone away.
And now coming back home
isn't really coming back home at all.
Jacqueline Woodson
#49. 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
#50. And crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples. The Negro thus educated is a hopeless liability of the race.
Carter G. Woodson
#51. I think I'd rather have my heart broke than do the breaking.
- Lena
Jacqueline Woodson
#53. Someday somebody's going to come along and knock this old fence down.
Jacqueline Woodson
#54. In fact, the confidence of the people is worth more than money.
Carter G. Woodson
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.
Jacqueline Woodson
#59. 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
#60. The education of the Negroes, then, the most important thing in the uplift of the Negroes, is almost entirely in the hands of those who have enslaved them and now segregate them.
Carter G. Woodson
#61. They still have some money, and they have needs to supply. They must begin immediately to pool their earnings and organize industries to participate in supplying social and economic demands.
Carter G. Woodson
#62. But death, as in birth, never comes at a convenient time. No matter how prepared you are that the moment is nigh, no matter how anticipatory you have been, there is never a moment where the realization that this it it, my life is changed forever, doesn't come as a bit of a shock.
Kristy Woodson Harvey
#63. If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.
Carter G. Woodson
#64. 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
#66. 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
#67. When I look at the way I was able to play in my 17th year, I feel like I earned the right to play in the NFL for another one,
Charles Woodson
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and carry out a program of his own.
Carter G. Woodson
#75. 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
#76. That's all anybody is-themselves. People all the time wanting to change that.
Jacqueline Woodson
#77. 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
#78. If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.
Carter G. Woodson
#79. Pecuniary embarrassment, he thought, was the cause of all evil to the blacks, for poverty kept them ignorant and their lack of enlightenment kept them degraded.
Carter G. Woodson
#80. The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.
Carter G. Woodson
#81. In the long run, there is not much discrimination against superior talent.
Carter G. Woodson
#82. 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
#83. I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise,
Jacqueline Woodson
#84. Truth comes to us from the past, then, like gold washed down from the mountains.
Carter G. Woodson
#85. I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.
Jacqueline Woodson
#86. 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
#87. The bondage of the Negro brought captive from Africa is one of the greatest dramas in history, and the writer who merely sees in that ordeal something to approve or condemn fails to understand the evolution of the human race.
Carter G. Woodson
#88. Sometimes ... you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.
Jacqueline Woodson
#89. No matter how big you get, it's still okay to cry because everybody's got a right to their own tears.
Jacqueline Woodson
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called Now.
Jacqueline Woodson
#95. 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
#96. One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.
Carter G. Woodson
#97. 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
#98. Everything and everyone seemed like it was part of a long-ago time - when I was young and free and living.
Jacqueline Woodson
#99. 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
#100. In schools of theology Negroes are taught the interpretation of the Bible worked out by those who have justified segregation and winked at the economic debasement of the Negro at times almost to the point of starvation.
Carter G. Woodson
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