Jesmyn Ward Quotes
-
On one hand, I can say, you know, I had many family members - I had many people in my extended family who left right after Katrina, who relocated to different cities, right? Houston, Atlanta. Right? Most of them have come back.
-
I do think that people will claim a certain fatigue about talking about race. But I think that even though they do, it's still necessary - completely necessary.
-
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 always think about Faulkner, and I would argue that there can be a difference between the way that characters express themselves internally and externally.
-
History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.
-
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.
-
Because everyone grows up together in my small hometown, everyone knows everyone else. And there are such large extended families that a lot of people are related to each other.
-
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.
-
As an artist, I feel a certain responsibility to write about difficult subject matter.
-
We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.
-
It's very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you're writing about such weighty issues.
-
Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.
-
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.
-
I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to.
-
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.
-
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.
-
My brother died when he was 19, so a part of me indulges and thinks that some part of him that made him uniquely him is out there, on another plane. So inventing the fictional afterlife in 'Sing, Unburied, Sing' was a way of making that wish real.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If I can get a page out in a day, I am celebrating.
-
I'm from a small town on the bottom edge of Mississippi, very near New Orleans and the Louisiana border. My family has lived there for generations.
-
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 live in the South; there are Confederate flags everywhere.