Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

the South is so heavy in her mouth my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I've ever known.

Maybe, I am thinking, there is something hidden like this, in all of us. A small gift from the universe waiting to be discovered. My

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. August

They were laughter on hot city nights hot milk on cold city mornings, good food and good times fancy dancing and soul music. They were family.

Nothing is like a quarter-mile sprint. All muscle and breath and power. And then it's over and you got a thing behind you—another race you can clock among your races.

Aunt Lucinda, Miss Bell and whatever neighbor has a breath or two left at the end of the day for sitting and running our mouths.

You know what, Daddy? What you got for me, Melody? This place feels like from a long time ago. It feels like it's in the past tense.

And when we pressed our heads to each other's hearts how did we not hear Carmen McRae singing? In Angela's fisted hands, Billie Holiday staggered past us and we didn't know her name. Nina Simone told us how beautiful we were and we didn't hear her voice.

As they grabbed each other's arms and bounce-walked down the hall, I was sure no ghost mothers existed in their pasts. I truly believed they were standing steadily in the world.

We watched them dip-walk away, too young to know how to respond. The four of us together weren't something they understood. They understood girls alone, folding their arms across their breasts, praying for invisibility.

One day I'd have full breasts, hips, and large hands. One day, my body would tell the world stories beneath the fabric of my clothes.

I hid you from them, you know, she said—like she was looking into my head finally. Seeing something there. That's how you got here. They were hella good Catholics back then, but you would have been dust. From who?

My Muslim beliefs lived just left of my heart. I was leaving space for something more promising.

Some evenings I don't know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.

Here she was, in all of her deep unknowing knowing that this was the place, this was the time to keep me here by letting me know how easy it would have been to stay fifteen. That the people I loved almost as much as I loved my own father would have determined me optional. Two words spoken early enough, I'm pregnant

He had never imagined a love as deep and endless as this.

Sometimes I'm just sitting in my room and a song will come on the radio that stops something inside of me, makes me sit up straight on my bed and listen. Sometimes, it's the piano chords, a sweet riff that has all eighty-eight keys talking. Sometimes it's the drums—high hat telling a story—I don't know how to explain the way music moves through my brain and my blood and my bones.

For God so loved the world,' their father would say, 'he gave his only begotten son'. But what about his daughters, I wondered. What did God do with his daughters?

But what I know now is this: Look at your grandmother's face. Remember the lines. Touch her cheekbones. Hold the memory of her in your fingers, in your eyes, in your mind. It might be all you get to keep.

Before the world as they knew it ended, they stepped out in heels with straightening-comb burns on their ears, gartered stockings, and lipstick for the first time.

Sometimes people don't get a chance to say good-bye, Stag.

she said she was going to live-that tomorrow wasn't guaranteed.

When I sit down beside my mother, she shivers. When I touch Ellie's shoulders, she smiles like she knows it's me. Maybe she does. Who could have told me that the wind was some passed-on soul stopping to touch your face, your hands, your hair. Who knew a surprising cool breeze was someone who had gone before you saying, 'You're loved.

There was no board of education. Instead, her mother loaded her up with textbooks and told her to study. But once her parents went off to work, Iris turned the television on, poured herself a second, third, fourth bowl of cereal, and sat watching game shows and soap operas.