Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

When you're 15, pain skips over reason, aims right for the marrow.

It seemed like someone was always leaving someone, like that's the way the world worked—people were born and people died, people left and people came. It was like the world was saying you can't have everything you want at the same time.

what is bad won't be bad forever, and what is good can sometimes last a long, long time.

But she didn't believe in God. Or Jesus. Or Satan. Or prayer. I believe in words, she said. I believe in numbers and all the history I understand. I believe in things I can see. When he was a little boy she used to hug him and say, And man-oh-man how I believe in you, Aubrey. My love. My light. My life.

Feels like I've known him since before he got to the world—longer than he knew himself, truthfully. Seems like we'd been friends really...Somewhere before life on earth...

Everything and everyone seemed like it was part of a long-ago time—when I was young and free and living.

No one stops to think, though—that maybe there is a reason for the darkness. Maybe people have to be reminded of it—of its power. At night, we go to sleep against the darkness. And if we wake up before morning, a lot of times we're afraid. We need it all though—the darkness and the light.

Life...moves us through all the time changes. All kinds of changes. And we're made so that we roll and move with it. Sometimes somebody gets stuck in the present and the rolling stops—but the changing doesn't.

For a long time, my mother's wasn't dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story. My father could have given in to the bottle or the needle or a woman and left my brother and me to care for ourselves - or worse, in the care of New York City Children's Services, where, my father said, there was seldom a happy ending. But this didn't happen. I know now that what is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory.

I didn't know it would be people you barely knew becoming friends that harbored you. And dreams you didn't even know you had - coming true. I didn't know it would be superpowers rising up out of tragedies, and perfect moments in a nearly empty classroom.

I watched my brother watch the world, his sharp, too-serious brow furrowing down in both angst and wonder. Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.

Tragedy is strange. It takes away. And it gives too" -Haley

What did it sound like...having someone call your name across a crowded school yard? How did it feel to turn to the sound of your name, to see some smiling face or waving hand and know it was for you and you alone?" —Staggerlee

That's good. Always take the time. You really never know when you're not going to have it anymore.

First they brought us here. Then we worked for free. Then it was 1863, and we were supposed to be free but we weren't. And that's why people are so mad.

Chapter 1 JEREMIAH WAS BLACK. HE COULD FEEL IT. THE WAY THE sun pressed down hard and hot on his skin in the summer. Sometimes it felt like he sweated black beads of oil. He felt warm inside his skin, protected. And in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—where everyone seemed to be some shade of black-he felt good walking through the neighborhood. But one step outside. Just one step and somehow the weight of his skin seemed to change. It got heavier. Light-skinned

I just shrug, not knowing what to say. How can I explain to anyone that stories are like air to me, I breathe them in and let them out over and over again.

Bro, how you doing? You holding on? Man, you know how it goes. One day chicken. Next day bone. Two old men talking

Each person dying floats aside. Making room for the one that's coming. Perhaps they meet on their journey. Perhaps they wave as each heads on home

Guess that's where the tears came from, knowing that there's so much in this great big world that you don't have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you'll have one less heartbreak in your life. Oh Lord. Some evenings I don't know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Fells like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.

Two steps to the left or right or back or front and you're standing outside your life.

So why was he feeling like this? Why was he feeling like some promise the universe made had been broken?

Maybe this was love—wanting someone with all the senses.

The empty swing set reminds us of this— that what is bad won't be bad forever, and what is good can sometimes last a long, long time.