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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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
With my writing, I try to do stuff I have not done before. Each time I sit down, I want to have a new experience, and by extension, I want my readers to have a different experience.
Jacqueline Woodson
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'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.
Jacqueline Woodson -
Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.
Jacqueline Woodson -
My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It's a narrative I never imagined for them.
Jacqueline Woodson
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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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I think there is much more queer visibility than there was when I was a kid. There is marriage, more trans visibility, and many more celebrities who are open about the sexuality. This was so not the case when I was a kid.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.
Jacqueline Woodson
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Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.
Jacqueline Woodson -
Greenville, S.C., in the 1970s is a rolling green dream in my memory now.
Jacqueline Woodson -
If you have no road map, you have to create your own.
Jacqueline Woodson -
Every time you revisit a book, you get something else out of it.
Jacqueline Woodson -
I can't write about nice, easy topics because that won't change the world. And I do want to change the world - one reader at a time.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson
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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.
Jacqueline Woodson -
Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.
Jacqueline Woodson -
In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of.
Jacqueline Woodson -
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.
Jacqueline Woodson