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I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I think people are willing to talk about anything if you come to it with kindness.
Jacqueline Woodson
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I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book's binder.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
When I was a child, we never began a meal without prayer. We thanked God for the food, for each other.
Jacqueline Woodson -
My writing is inspired by where I come from, where I am today, and where I hope to go some day.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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
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People who are living in economic struggle are more than their circumstances. They're majestic and creative and beautiful.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I think when I was a young person, there was just kind of - there was very little dialogue about it. And there was just kind of one way to be gay, right? You saw very effeminate guys. You saw very butch women. And there was no kind of in-between. And there was no - you know, there wasn't anything in the media. There wasn't anything on television.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.
Jacqueline Woodson
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I'm usually working on several things at once. If I get bored with one, I can go on to another. That way, I never get stuck.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.'
Jacqueline Woodson -
I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I think there is such a richness to the South and a lushness and a way of life.
Jacqueline Woodson -
Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.
Jacqueline Woodson
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Hope is universal.
Jacqueline Woodson -
The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I don't believe there are 'struggling' readers, 'advanced' readers, or 'non' readers.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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