Jacqueline Woodson Quotes
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To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
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I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.
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I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.
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I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.
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I don't want my kids to have to walk through a world where they have to constantly explain who they are and who their family is.
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Everything I write, I read aloud. It has to sound a certain way and look a certain way on page.
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Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.
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As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.
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When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, 'Instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.'
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Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.
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For my family, 'black-ish' is the reward on a Thursday evening - a day after the show officially airs, when it's finally available to be streamed.
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My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.
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I think that's important: to know 'the other,' as a means of coming to understanding.
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My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It's a narrative I never imagined for them.
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I have a short attention span, so when one book isn't working out, I just work on another.
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I always say I write because I have questions, not because I have answers. It's true that you begin the conversation - that's the role of the artist. But it's not my job to tell us what to do next. I wish I had those tools.
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I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.
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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.
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Who are you without your girls? I truly believe that. Who are you without the people who help you make sense of the misogyny, the racism, the economic struggle, all of it? You need those people saying you're a good mom, a great writer. You're a great dresser. You cook well. Whatever the beauty is that you need to hear.
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If you have no road map, you have to create your own.
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I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.
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I think, as a kid, turning on the television and seeing that everyone seemed to be wealthy and white made me feel like an outsider, lesser than. I was not wealthy. I was not white.
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Greenville, S.C., in the 1970s is a rolling green dream in my memory now.
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Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.