Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
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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.
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I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.
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When I was a child, we never began a meal without prayer. We thanked God for the food, for each other.
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I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book's binder.
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I don't want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.
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I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.
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You can't have too many books featuring people of color, just like you can't have too many books featuring white people.
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People who are living in economic struggle are more than their circumstances. They're majestic and creative and beautiful.
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My writing is inspired by where I come from, where I am today, and where I hope to go some day.
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My family is big, complicated, and beautiful - and keeps me smiling and whole. It's so important to have family, whether it's biological family, good friends, foster families, or a group of aunties who are raising you. The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
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Reading equals hope times change.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.
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'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.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.
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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.
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My grandparents were wealthy; my mom was not. I would walk into these worlds of privilege and then walk back into this other world. My little brother is biracial. So race and economic class and sexuality - these were always issues that were a part of my life.
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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.
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Hope is universal.