Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

The FBI says Angela Davis is one of America's Most Wanted.

first book There are seven of them, haikus mostly but rhyming ones, too. Not enough for a real book until I cut each page into a small square staple the squares together, write one poem on each page. Butterflies by Jacqueline Woodson on the front. The butterfly book complete now.

I should have known that sometimes common sense skips a generation.

Everyone else has gone away. And now coming back home isn't really coming back home at all.

fabric store, we are not Colored or Negro. We are not thieves or shameful or something to be hidden away. At the fabric store, we're just people.

A front porch swing thirsty for oil.

In the stores downtown we're always followed around just because we're brown.

I don't "take a lot of mess." I have no tolerance for people who are not thinking deeply about things. I have no tolerance for the kind of small talk that people need to fill silence, and I have no tolerance for people not being a part of the world and being in it and trying to change it.

No voting. No fighting. No cursing. No wars.

But damn, am I hella tired, Iris. Hella tired.

That's all anybody is-themselves. People all the time wanting to change that.

My grandmother tells us all this as we sit at her feet, each story like a photograph we can look right into, see our mother there marchers and dogs and kittens all blending

Our baby brother, Roman, was born pale as dust. His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop people on the street. Whose angel child is this? they want to know. When I say, My brother, the people wear doubt thick as a cape until we smile and the cape falls.

The Hocking River moves like a flowing arm away from the Ohio River runs through towns as though it's chasing its own freedom, the same way the Ohio runs north from Virginia until it's safely away from the South.

They're all inside of us,...past people and present people. And probably even the people we'll become.

I want to write this down, that revolution is like a merry-go-round, history always being made somewhere. And maybe for a short time, we're part of that history. And then the ride stops and our turn is over. We walk slowly toward the park, where I can already see the big swings empty and waiting for me. And after I write it down, maybe I'll end it this way. My name is Jacqueline Woodson and I am ready for the ride.

Finally sixteen and the moment like a hand holding me out to the world.

He would give his own life to see Melody able to stay this young, to see her live her teenage life—all the years. He wanted to pull her to him now. Say, Hold on to yourself, Melody. Don't get lost. He wanted to say again what he'd said to her so many times before. You're loved, baby, you're loved.

In Oakland, they started a free breakfast program so that poor kids can have a meal before starting their school day. Pancakes

he's not my hero, he's my dad, which means he's my every single thing.

When I tell my family I want to be a writer, they smile and say, We see you in the backyard with your writing. They say, We hear you making up all those stories. And, We used to write poems. And, It's a good hobby, we see how quiet it keeps you. They say, But maybe you should be a teacher, a lawyer, do hair . . . I'll think about it, I say. And maybe all of us know this is just another one of my stories.

You know how many more rich Negroes there'd be if we wasn't all the time trying to pay off some lawyer or bailing a brother out. That's one thing I'm truly guilty of--giving hard-earned money to the man.

When my mother comes home from the hospital with me, my older brother takes one look inside the pink blanket, says, Take her back. We already have one of those. Already

Old people used to always say, You only as old as you feel. Here I am closer to fifty than forty, but I feel older than that most days. Feel like the world is trying to pull me down back into it.