Top 191 Quotes & Sayings by Jacqueline Woodson
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Jacqueline Woodson.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
I always say I write because I have questions, not because I have answers. It's true that you begin the conversation - that's the role of the artist. But it's not my job to tell us what to do next. I wish I had those tools.
The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.
The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.
I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.
If you have no road map, you have to create your own.
My writing is inspired by where I come from, where I am today, and where I hope to go some day.
A 10-year-old knows a lot. If you think she or he isn't noticing the world around them, you're missing a lot.
Until I was about 13, Manhattan had been a world seen from its edges.
I write for whoever needs to read it.
What I learned for myself... is that no matter what the circumstances, people survive.
Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing's coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said, 'This is really good.'
For my family, 'black-ish' is the reward on a Thursday evening - a day after the show officially airs, when it's finally available to be streamed.
My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It's a narrative I never imagined for them.
Greenville, S.C., in the 1970s is a rolling green dream in my memory now.
The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.
I'm fascinated by adult women who don't have close friends and how that could come to be. I think when you're a kid, the relationships are so intimate, and you're so connected to your girls, so what becomes of them? What could possibly happen to have you become an adult woman and no longer have that?
I wrote all the time, and I had teachers who encouraged it.
You can't have too many books featuring people of color, just like you can't have too many books featuring white people.
We, as adults, are the gatekeepers, and we have to check our own fears at the door because we want our children to be smarter than we are. We want them to be more fully human than we are.
I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.
I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book's binder.
The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'
Every time you revisit a book, you get something else out of it.
I have a short attention span, so when one book isn't working out, I just work on another.
Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.
I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.
If someone has something they're really passionate about, that's their brilliance, and my big question is how do we grow that passion/brilliance and/or help them grow.
I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
When I was a child, we never began a meal without prayer. We thanked God for the food, for each other.
I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.
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.
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.
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.
Told a lot of stories as a child. Not 'Once upon a time' stories but, basically, outright lies. I loved lying and getting away with it!
The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.
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.
I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.
In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.
I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.
As a person of color, as a woman, as a body moving through this particular space in time, I realize the streets of New York tell the story of resistance, an African-American history of brilliance and beauty that, even in its most brutal moments, did not - could not - kill our resilient and powerful spirit.
There was something about telling the lie-story and seeing your friends' eyes grow wide with wonder. Of course I got in trouble for lying, but I didn't stop until fifth grade.
I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.
As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.
I can't write about nice, easy topics because that won't change the world. And I do want to change the world - one reader at a time.
Friendship is such an important thing to me, and I feel like the people who I love and help keep me whole - I can't imagine a life without them.
I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.
I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.
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.
I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.
I didn't have any idea of what I was getting into by going away to college. And I was scared. I was scared of failing. I was scared of it not being for me because I was going to be one of the first people in my family to go off to college.
I've wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn't grow up in family where people aspired to live as writers.
By the time I was in fifth grade, I was dreaming of the Pulitzer Prize.
Who are you without your girls? I truly believe that. Who are you without the people who help you make sense of the misogyny, the racism, the economic struggle, all of it? You need those people saying you're a good mom, a great writer. You're a great dresser. You cook well. Whatever the beauty is that you need to hear.
The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South.
The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.
My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.
In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of.
I think it's so important that, if I'm writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they're hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.
Hope is universal.
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