Jesmyn Ward Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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In 2012, I was over the moon to be there, especially as it was our home Olympics. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I just wanted to take everything in.
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Racism is a physical experience.
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I really want women to know their power, to value their experience. To understand that nothing has been more wholesome in the political process than the increased involvement of women.
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I hate these platforms that are all over the place today; they are all about grabbing attention. They are suburban! I never do a platform. Well, I did, in the 1970s, but that was a bad experience.
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I screen tested for 'The Tudors' in N.Y. That was my first experience of N.Y., being flown here to screen test with Jonathan Rhys Meyers. So I have very, very fond memories of New York – New York helped give me my first big break.
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Being listened to and being heard is an experience that doesn't happen terribly often. To listen compassionately or nonjudgmentally to another person - not to get too heavy about it - but I once heard somebody say that was a form of real prayer.
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College was where I got to actually experience the difference between black and white.
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The wiser you get, the more experience you have, and the more you see people for who they are as human beings, as opposed to figures you have to fight against.
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In New York, you walk everywhere, so you're amongst people all of the time, and everybody is in a hurry and going somewhere or has something on their minds. And in L.A., it's still much more of a laid-back life, at least in my experience.
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When I'm home on a break, I lock myself in my room and play guitar. After two or three hours, I start getting into this total meditation. It's a feeling few people experience, and that's usually when I come up with weird stuff. It just flows. I can't force myself. I don't sit down and say I've got to practice.
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I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story.
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I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'
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I believe life is an 'experience ball.' You throw it at someone, it picks up their response... it grows. You play with that ball, learning what it teaches you.
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The excitement of the fans in Montreal, especially in the playoffs, I don't think you can get that anywhere else. For a hockey player, I kind of wish everyone could go through that and experience what it is to play there. It's very unique.
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But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been.
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Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.
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Bankruptocracy is as much a European predicament as it is an American 'invention.' The difference between the experience of the two continents is that at least Americans did not have to labour under the enormous design faults of the eurozone.
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I learned a lot from Dick Wolf. I'll always remember playing that character because it was such a good character. It was great to be able to be a character like that for television. I think the thing that I'll bring from the whole experience, the whole 10 years, is I had never been interested in the television business before.
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Making movies was a real weird kind of adult experience. In a way it was like MIT, in that it was a great education. The big lesson is, people are people. They're smart, funny, creative people, but they're people.
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I think people deceive themselves about themselves, particularly as they get older.
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Far too many times over the next 12 to 15 years, it was brought to my attention that people who followed my exercise guidelines exactly but ignored their diet, their weight and their cigarette smoking had heart attacks at age 55.
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I'm a New York girl. I want to stay here and raise my son here.
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If you're feeling a little bit down, a bit of kneading helps.
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There was nothing postracial about my experience, and there still isn't.
