Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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Well, we like to let down our hair and pep it up at the dances, but we keep it slower when we broadcast. We have to please everybody, and that softer music appeals to the larger amount of people. It's like eating too much cake. You have to have your steak too.
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I really like performing for people.
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I've never been all that interested or aware of what people are thinking about me or saying about me. I think that has kept me safest and sanest.
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I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family – poor, in fact.
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I've never seen anyone handling pans in the streets of New York, and if I did I doubt I'd give them money, unless I needed a pan. I do give money to homeless people, whether they ask or no.
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Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means.
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People are clamoring to hear good ideas as opposed to the lesser of two evils... Either the Democrats are going to win or the Republicans are going to win, but the losers are all of us out here as citizens that really do want meaningful change, and none of it's happening. There's no dialogue regarding meaningful change.
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I've put up with more humiliation than I care to remember.
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No one who is in this world will deny that evils exist. What, then, do we say? That evil is not a living and animated substance, but a condition of the soul which is opposed to virtue and which springs up In the slothful because of their falling away from good.
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I've led a charmed life. I've known people who have been depressed, and I've never had that.
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A writer has to live with a sense of honor.
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Cherish your human connections - your relationships with friends and family.
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After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.
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I'm really private, and also, when I'm home, I'm home. I don't like people in on my business. I believe that you can be overexposed.
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I started playing bluegrass with my family, so there were the G, C and D chords. I was playing a Martin acoustic because that's what Carter Stanley of the Stanley Brothers played. Then I got into the really raw blues of Hound Dog Taylor and started on electric guitar.
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We live because of the dreams.
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Diversity in the industry is very lacking, and equal opportunity comes very far and few between for people of color.
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I see girls who are so skinny on the catwalks, and I know so many of them destroy their lives and their family's lives.
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The thing that what we're taught in the public school system is everything you should know, I disagree with that. The most brilliant people in the world were dropouts - not that I'm pro-dropping out.
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Learning how to swim is the biggest achievement for me, as it helped me get rid of hydrophobia. Now I have become a complete water baby.
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We just didn't put any pressure on each other, and I think that everybody needs somebody, and I didn't do it to try to do it; it's what we [with Nina Simone] were to each other.
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Rock was always part of my heart and soul. But the times just changed and everybody wanted to dance.
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Juggling many projects and having all these accidental collisions that you can't predict enables a kind of comparative thinking. To focus on a single project from beginning to end is extremely difficult, not just for me, but for many people.
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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.
