Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

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.

The world is getting noisier. We've gone from boomboxes to Walkmen to portable CD players to iPods to any song we want, whenever we want it. We've gone from the four television channels of my childhood to the seeming infinity of cable and streaming. As technology moves us faster and faster through time and space, it seems to feel like story is getting pushed out of the way, I mean, literally pushed out of the narrative. But even as our engagement with stories change, or the trappings around it morph from book to audio to Instagram to Snapchat, we must remember our finger beneath the words. Remember that story, regardless of the format, has always taken us to places we never thought we'd go, introduced us to people we never thought we'd meet and shown us worlds that we might have missed. So as technology keeps moving faster and faster, I am good with something slower. My finger beneath the words has led me to a life of writing books for people of all ages, books meant to be read slowly, to be savored.

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.

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.

When we can't find my sister, we know / she is under the kitchen table, a book in her hand, / a glass of milk and a small bowl of peanuts beside her. / We know we can call Odella's name out loud, / slap the table hard with our hands, / dance around it singing 'She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain' / so many times the song makes us sick / and the circling makes us dizzy / and still / my sister will do nothing more / than slowly turn the page.

Do you remember?'
Someone's always asking and
someone else, always does

I want to write this down, that the revolution is like a merry-go-round, history always being made somewhere. And maybe for a short time, we're a part of that history. And then the ride stops and our turn is over.

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

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

I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called Now.

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?

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.

Sometimes people don't get a chance to say good-bye, Stag.

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.

My sister's clear soft voice opens up the world to me. I lean in so hungry for it.

She said she'd chosen Santa Cruz because when se walked around the campus, she blended somehow, no one asking if she was part Negro, no one accusing her of passing for white.

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.

Will the words end, I ask
whenever I remember to.
Nope, my sister says, all of five years old now,
and promising me
infinity.

Every dandelion blown,
each 'Star light, star bright
The first star I see tonight'.
My wish is always the same.
Every fallen eyelash
and first firefly of the summer
The dream remains

Seems like every time life starts straightening itself out, something's gotta go and happen.

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.

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.

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.

She said she was going to live-that tomorrow wasn't guaranteed.

And in the night, when the dog barks at shadows, tell him
not to be afraid of what he cannot see
or the things he does not yet understand.
There is mystery everywhere.
Beneath rocks, there is damp earth
and an army of ants
planning a revolution.

Esteban stood at the front of the room, staring at the page. Then he lifted his head and looked at us. We cheered again, even louder this time. I don't know if any of us really understood his dad's poem. But for a long time after he'd finished reading, I thought about that army of ants, how they were coming together.
Like us.

Even with all that fine living, that fire stayed with my mama. Caught her up in the night as a child and woke her sweating and screaming. That's why I don't buy it when people say children don't know. That they're too young to understand. If they can walk and talk, they can understand. You look at how much growing a baby does in the first few years of its life - crawling, walking, talking, laughing. The brain just changing and changing. You can't tell me all of it's not becoming a part of their blood. Their memory.

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?

When you have so much real drama in your life, it's hard to think about fiction.

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.

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.

You're writing, you're coasting, and you're thinking, 'This is the best thing I've ever written, and it's coming so easily, and these characters are so great.' You put it aside for whatever reason, and you open it up a week later and the characters have turned to cardboard and the book has completely fallen apart," she says. "That's the moment of truth for every writer: Can I go on from here and make this book into something? I think it separates the writers from the nonwriters. And I think it's the reason a lot of people have that unfinished manuscript around the house, that albatross.

Write down what I think I know. The knowing will come.
Just keep listening ...

That's all anybody is-themselves. People all the time wanting to change that.

And as we stood half circle in the bright school yard, we saw the lost and beautiful and hungry in each of us. We saw home.

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.

Probably still believed that if you wished hard enough you could make the impossible happen.

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.

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

My love for looking deeply and closely at the world, for putting my whole self into it, and by doing so, seeing the many, many possibilities of a narrative, turned out to be a gift, because taking my sweet time taught me everything I needed to know about writing. And writing taught me everything I needed to know about creating worlds where people could be seen and heard, where their experiences could be legitimized, and where my story, read or heard by another person, inspired something in them that became a connection between us, a conversation. And isn't that what this is all about -- finding a way, at the end of the day, to not feel alone in this world, and a way to feel like we've changed it before we leave? Stone to hammer, man to mummy, idea to story -- and all of it, remembered.

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

I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.

He wondered where that stuff went to, where love went to, how a person could just love somebody one day and boom –- the next day love somebody else.

People are going to judge you all the time no matter what you do ... Don't worry about other people. Worry about you.

In your life, if you're lucky enough, you are born during a moment in time when the world is ready for the change you're bringing.

Sometimes ... you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

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.

He loved October. Had always loved it. There was something sad and beautiful about it - the ending and beginning of things.

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.

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.

Chapter 1 JEREMIAH WAS BLACK. HE COULD FEEL IT. THE WAY THE sun pressed down hard and hot on his skin in the summer. Sometimes it felt like he sweated black beads of oil. He felt warm inside his skin, protected. And in Fort Greene, Brooklyn - where everyone seemed to be some shade of black-he felt good walking through the neighborhood. But one step outside. Just one step and somehow the weight of his skin seemed to change. It got heavier. Light-skinned

In all your getting, get understanding.

I think in terms of being a New Yorker, as my friends would say, I don't take a lot of mess. I have no tolerance for people who are not thinking deeply about things. I have no tolerance for the kind of small talk that people need to fill silence. And I have no tolerance for people just not being a part of the world and being in it and trying to change it.

This earth is seventy percent water. Hard not to walk into it.

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.

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.

Then for a moment like so many times before this I lost the words. Watched them drop . . . No. Dissipate . . . from the air between us. Dissipate. The word has shown up on my SAT prep tests again and again until it landed in this room with us. Between my mother. And me.

In our yearbook, there is a picture of me and Miah - sitting in Central Park - Miah has his lips poked out and is about to kiss me on my cheek. And I'm looking straight into the camera laughing. Two and half years have passed, and still, this is how I remember us. This is how I will always remember us. And I know when I look at that picture, when I think back to those few months with Miah, that I did not miss the moment.

I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.

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.

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

But once, a cardinal alighted on the kitchen windowsill and he found himself squinting long after it had flown away again, trying hard to hold on to its beauty.

When there are many worlds
you can choose the one
you walk into each day.

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.

Stories can be windows, but also mirrors.

I didn't know it would be people you barely knew becoming friends that harbored you. And dreams you didn't even know you had - coming true. I didn't know it would be superpowers rising up out of tragedies, and perfect moments in a nearly empty classroom.

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

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.

This is what kindness does, Ms.Albert said. Each little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world.

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.

Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn't one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here.

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.

We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico.

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

They had always been soft-spoken. Because they had always been afraid.

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.

At night, every living thing competes for a chance to be heard. The crickets and frogs call out. Sometimes, there's the soft who-whoo of an owl lost amid the pines. Even the dogs won't rest until they've howled at the moon. But the crickets always win, long after the frogs stop croaking and the owl has found its way home. Long after the dogs have lain down losing the battle against sleep, the crickets keep going as though they know their song is our lullaby.

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,

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.

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?

No past. No future. Just this perfect Now.

Would the tragic comedy of memory ever stop replaying?

Some evenings, I kneel toward Mecca with my uncle.
Maybe Mecca
is the place Leftie goes to in his mind, when
the memory of losing
his arm becomes too much. Maybe Mecca is
good memories,
presents and stories and poetry and arroz con pollo
and family and friends...

Maybe Mecca is the place everyone is looking for...

It's out there in front of you, my uncle says.

I know I'll know it
when I get there.

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

Guess that's where the tears came from, knowing that there's so much in this great big world that you don't have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you'll have one less heartbreak in your life.

Some evenings I don't know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.

I am in love with everything around me,
the dotted white lines moving
across my teacher's blackboard, the smell of chalk, the flag jutting out from the wall and slowly swaying above.
There is nothing more beautiful that P.S. 106.
Nothing more perfect than my first-grade classroom.
No one more kind than Ms. Feilder, who meets me at the door each morning,
takes my hand from my sister's, smiles down and says,
Now that Jacqueline is here, the day can begin.
And I believe her.
Yes, I truly believe her.

I didn't just appear one day. I didn't just wake up and know how to write my name. I keep writing, knowing now that I was a long time coming.

I have all this stuff - all these thoughts going on inside me and they all seem so - so dangerous.
- Tyler

She felt red at the bone - like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding.

When I used to dream about that somebody they never had a face. It was more like a feeling.

I wouldn't mind the early autumn if you came home today I'd tell you how much I miss you and know I'd be okay. It's funny how we never know exactly how our life will go It's funny how a dream can fade with the break of day. Time can't erase the memory and time can't bring you home Last Summer was a part of me and now a part is gone. - Margaret

know now that what is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory.

Someday somebody's going to come along and knock this old fence down.

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?

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.

When Daddy's garden is ready
it is filled with words that make me laugh
when I say them-
pole beans and tomatoes, okra and corn
sweet peas and sugar snaps,
lettuce and squash.

Who could have imagined

so much color that the ground disappears
and we are left
walking through an autumn's worth
or crazy words
that beneath the magic
of my grandmother's hands

become

side dishes.

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.

This is how the time moves - an hour here, a day somewhere, and then it's night and then it's morning. A clock ticking on a shelf. A small child running to school, a father coming home.
Time moves over us and past us, and the feeling of lips pressed against lips fades into memory. A picture yellows at its edges. A phone rings in an empty room.

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.