Jesmyn Ward Quotes
-
I am grateful to the activists and women who created the Black Lives Matter movement because I feel like they let me know I wasn't crazy.
-
I recently read a collection of stories called 'Boondock Kollage,' by Regina Bradley. The stories follow multiple characters through the South, through the past and present. I loved reading that book: the first time I read the opening story, I was breathless and incoherent.
-
I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.
-
I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers.
-
People ask me all the time, 'Why did I move home?' As well as I can articulate it, that's why. I moved home because I love the community that I come from.
-
I always think about Faulkner, and I would argue that there can be a difference between the way that characters express themselves internally and externally.
-
When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested in telling the story and also very worried about the effects the story would have.
-
One of the most important things that I want for my kids is I want them to live. You know, I want them to live to see 21 and beyond.
-
I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.
-
On one hand, I am very pessimistic, but on the other hand, if I didn't believe that speaking up would do something, I wouldn't have spoken.
-
It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.
-
The first writer that I think of immediately that I studied with at Michigan is Peter Ho Davies. He was really important to me, tackling that first novel. Just writing it.
-
My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.
-
We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.
-
Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.
-
My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.
-
As an artist, I feel a certain responsibility to write about difficult subject matter.
-
It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'
-
In the past, I travelled with 'The Hero and the Crown' by Robin McKinley: I suffer from a fear of flying, and I felt a bit safer knowing I carried the book and characters with me.
-
When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid by the family my mother worked for. It was hard being the only one, and I faced a fair amount of racist and classist bullying there.
-
I hope that I never have to work in a place that sells large quantities of jeans ever again. Jeans are rough! It used to kill my hands. I know that sounds prissy - I'm not prissy at all. But it did; it killed my hands. It was awful.
-
If I can get a page out in a day, I am celebrating.
-
I love my community. I love always being able to come back and have a home.
-
At one time, when I was eight years old, my mother and father, my brother and my sisters - we had to move back in with my grandmother, and there were 13 of us living in one house.