Top 55 Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

I read a lot of the books that I love again and again and again and try to understand how the writer did it.

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.

When I was a child, we never began a meal without prayer. We thanked God for the food, for each other.

In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what’s going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

Being a Witness was too closed an experience. That’s what I walked away from, not the things I believe.

‘Another Brooklyn’ came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.

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.

People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

I think people are willing to talk about anything if you come to it with kindness.

My grandparents were wealthy; my mom was not. I would walk into these worlds of privilege and then walk back into this other world. My little brother is biracial. So race and economic class and sexuality – these were always issues that were a part of my life.

In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.

My writing is inspired by where I come from, where I am today, and where I hope to go some day.

Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.

I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children’s literature.

What I learned for myself… is that no matter what the circumstances, people survive.

A 10-year-old knows a lot. If you think she or he isn’t noticing the world around them, you’re missing a lot.

Told a lot of stories as a child. Not ‘Once upon a time’ stories but, basically, outright lies. I loved lying and getting away with it!

I think that’s important: to know ‘the other,’ as a means of coming to understanding.

Hope is universal.

I’m fascinated by adult women who don’t have close friends and how that could come to be. I think when you’re a kid, the relationships are so intimate, and you’re so connected to your girls, so what becomes of them? What could possibly happen to have you become an adult woman and no longer have that?

My mom was a big fan of Al Green… James Brown we weren’t allowed to listen to, so of course I knew James Brown.

I feel like I’m a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There’s a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There’s a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.

I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.

Memory doesn’t come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.

By the time I was in fifth grade, I was dreaming of the Pulitzer Prize.

The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.

In young adult novels and children’s books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.

I am still surprised when I walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book’s binder.

What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.

The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South.

Sometimes, when I’m sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing’s coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said, ‘This is really good.’

I think, even though homophobia still exists, there is much more of a dialogue and a taboo around being homophobic.

I think there is such a richness to the South and a lushness and a way of life.

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.

If you have no road map, you have to create your own.

In the daytime, I was expected to be the straight-A student. I was expected to be college bound. I was expected to be a great big sister. And then at night, I was just a club kid.

I didn’t know how many independent bookstores had amazing wine lists until I toured with ‘Another Brooklyn.’

I don’t want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.

Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.

I’m inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.

When someone says to me, ‘I love your book – I read it in a day,’ I want to tell them to go back and read it again.

I realized if I didn’t start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn’t be around to help me look back and remember.

I couldn’t be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I’m pretty optimistic.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn’t grow up in family where people aspired to live as writers.

I wrote all the time, and I had teachers who encouraged it.

To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you’ve moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.

I think it’s so important that, if I’m writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they’re hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.

My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It’s a narrative I never imagined for them.

I’m usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.

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.

The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It’s so hard to show something that’s bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.

As a person of color, as a woman, as a body moving through this particular space in time, I realize the streets of New York tell the story of resistance, an African-American history of brilliance and beauty that, even in its most brutal moments, did not – could not – kill our resilient and powerful spirit.

Childhood, young adulthood is fluid. And it’s very easy to get labeled very young and have to carry something through your childhood and into your adulthood that is not necessarily who you are.