Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
-
I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.
-
My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.
-
'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.
-
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.
-
If you have no road map, you have to create your own.
-
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.
-
Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.
-
Hope is universal.
-
In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.
-
I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.
-
I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
-
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.'
-
I deeply believe in many Christian values: love people; do the right thing; know that there's good in everyone, that God's looking out for all of us.
-
'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.
-
I feel like once I say out loud, to the public, what I'm working on, it's never going to be an actual book. So until it's close to done, I keep pretty quiet about my next stuff!
-
To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day,' I want to tell them to go back and read it again.
-
The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it's so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative.
-
Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had.
-
In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of.
-
The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
-
In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.