Top 77 Jesmyn Ward Quotes

I’m still a bit of a reading glutton, I think, because I browse, read a bit of the back copy, flip through the book, read a bit of the text, and if it still seems fascinating, I read it. That’s why my bedside table is so cluttered: I want to imbibe it all.

I knew it would be painful to write a memoir.

I hope people who read my books feel empathy for us and really see us as complicated people.

People ask me about staying here. I think they assume that I wouldn’t want to come back to a place like Mississippi, which is so backward and which frustrates me a lot. The responsibility that I feel to tell these stories about the people and the place that I’m from is what pulls me back.

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.

I’m always curious about other writers’ routines.

That’s why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

There was nothing postracial about my experience, and there still isn’t.

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.

It’s impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families’ pasts, don’t include our non-European ancestors.

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.

Great trouble breeds great art, I think.

A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.

Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.

My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers – how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a lot of her friends, and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren’t.

I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren’t.

My people are still poor. They’re still working class. All of the characters that I write about are inspired by the community that I’m from.

I need the lightness of children’s lit.

There was something so empowering about having President Obama in office because I know that for many of us, that’s something that we never thought that we’d see in our lifetime.

I can’t stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

I think that often in the United States we’re very blind to the ways that history lives in the present.

It’s very hard to deal with true subject matter, especially when you’re writing about such weighty issues.

As an artist, I feel a certain responsibility to write about difficult subject matter.

When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls who in some ways are outsiders.

My mother worked for a white family that lived in one of the mansions on the beach. The husband in the family was a lawyer; he worked for a firm in New Orleans.

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.

Physical books are still my favorite, but I own an e-book reader. They’re convenient for travel.

I worked with several writers at the University of Michigan: Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Laura Kasischke, and Thomas Lynch, who told me the same thing over and over again: Persist. Read, write, and improve: tell your stories.

It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.

I couldn’t run from that desire to tell stories, that desire to tell stories about us, and about the people I loved.

My time in New York really clarified things for me. I thought, ‘What could I do with my life that would give it meaning?’ And writing was that for me.

There are moments from childhood that attract heat in our memories, some for their sublime brilliance, some for their malignancy. The first time that I was treated differently because of my race is one such memory.

In American culture at large, but especially in African American culture, it’s a sign of weakness to ask for help.

After I finished my first draft of ‘Salvage the Bones,’ I felt that I wasn’t political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.

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.

Sometimes, you get tired of fighting. I think you just sort of come to this realization that yes, that you will get tired, but that doesn’t mean that you can give up the fight.

I live in the South; there are Confederate flags everywhere.

I’ve found that in fiction – and this is just the kind of writer I am – I can’t really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can’t approach creative nonfiction like that.

I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans – but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?

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.

The women here are the ones that hold the families together. So if my mom were to be unhappy with me, in a way, it would be like I would have lost my entire family.

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.

People are not afraid to be activists, to be vocal. And I think back to my years in college, and that wasn’t the case.

Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work because these are not universal stories.

At every turn, Molly Antopol’s gorgeous debut story collection, ‘The UnAmericans,’ is firing on multiple cylinders.

Faulkner’s characters, too, were uneducated. They were deprived, but they were allowed to have very rich inner lives. I want to advocate for that, for inner lives that are much more complicated and more poetic than we think.

If I can get a page out in a day, I am celebrating.

I thought about all those people whose suffering had been erased, and I thought, ‘Why can’t they speak? Why can’t I undo some of that erasure?’

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.

Before Hurricane Katrina, I always felt like I could come back home. And home was a real place, and also it had this mythical weight for me. Because of the way that Hurricane Katrina ripped everything away, it cast that idea in doubt.

While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.

I didn’t start really focusing on writing until I was 24.

Without the library, I would have been lost.

I grew up in a lot of different homes when I was younger: my parents rented trailers and small, boxy houses set high on cement block pillars.

I lived in San Francisco and did the Stegner fellowship for two years, and it was amazing. From fall 2008 to spring 2010, I was there.

While I’ve said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.

I try to treat writing as part of my daily routine: I write for at least two hours, five days per week. I tend to write at home, in a room I’ve set aside for the task. I don’t work well in cafes or busy, loud spaces, although I wish I could. It would mean greater flexibility for me.

I’m a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

If I’m honest about the people that I love, then I need my characters to live through the same things that the people I love and care about are living with and struggling with.