Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

For me as a writer, it was understanding that we're so far behind in our way of dealing with death. We put someone in the ground, we bury them or we burn them, and then we're supposed to just move on and kind of get over it.

You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.

I feel like the world stopped. And I got off...and then it started spinning again, but too fast for me to hop back on. I feel like I'm still trying to get a...to get some kind of foothold on living

We do inherently know that poetry is about the way we speak. It's about where we pause, where we drop our words in the middle of a sentence. It's about the rhythm and the cadence of the way we speak. It's about putting that down at the end of the day.

Where I grew up, it was all people who were black and Latino, people who look like me. Now I live in a neighborhood where very, very few people look like me.

I feel like so much of what I'm doing is making a road where there is no road and inviting people on that road with me. It's scary. It's scary, but I can't listen to the voices that are saying form is the only way, or that there is only this kind of form or that kind of form.

I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much...so, so much.

I couldnt be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because Im pretty optimistic.

Sometimes...you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.

I've learned a lot as a writer about poetry.

What you say is what matters.

If I loved someone enough, I would go anywhere in the world with them." —Staggerlee

I wouldn't mind the early autumn if you came home today I'd tell you how much I miss you and know I'd be okay. It's funny how we never know exactly how our life will go It's funny how a dream can fade with the break of day. Time can't erase the memory and time can't bring you home Last Summer was a part of me and now a part is gone. —Margaret

Mama says it's okay to be on the quiet side—if quiet means you're listening, watching, taking it all in.

Don't trust women, my mother said to me. Even the ugly ones will take what you thought was yours.

There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.

Yes, writing is not easy. But can any writer imagine NOT writing?

I rewrite my books until they're mostly memorized so that's a lot of rewrites, a lot of time spent with my stories.

As a poet who has the tools for interpreting the poem differently, you can begin to deconstruct it. But the human being who's like, "I know about conversation, I know about language, I know about hard times," will approach the poem differently.

When I'm writing flawed characters, I just think about my own flaws.

One place exists as their interpretation of it. For the people living and thriving inside of it, it's another place.

I think only once in your life do you find someone that you say, "Hey, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my time on this earth with." And if you miss it, or walk away from it, or even maybe, blink - it's gone.

I think I had gotten messages really young that poetry wasn't for me, that it was for, basically, some dead white men. My experience and my intellect was on the outside of understanding that. I think that's what's so destructive.

My favorite reader is one that revisits books and gets something new out of them each time.