Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

When Daddy's garden is ready it is filled with words that make me laugh when I say them- pole beans and tomatoes , okra and corn sweet peas and sugar snaps , lettuce and squash . Who could have imagined so much color that the ground disappears and we are left walking through an autumn's worth or crazy words that beneath the magic of my grandmother's hands become side dishes.

He went way up in the air and when he came down again, he got up and ran away. But he stopped at the corner, Angel says. And died.

Now out on the floor, Melody and Malcolm were being joined by their friends, other babies turned into teenagers becoming a crush of butt-length braids and perfectly shaped fades, long painted nails lacing into lotioned teen-boy hands. He shook out his shoulders, realized his own hands were sweating. Most of the grown-ups were tapping their feet, some even moving in to dance beside the young people.

But that afternoon there was an orchestra playing. Music filling the brownstone. Black fingers pulling violin bows and strumming cellos, dark lips around horns, a small brown girl with pale pink nails on flute. Malcolm's younger brother, his dark skin glistening, blowing somberly into a harmonica. A broad?shouldered woman on harp. From my place on the stairs, I could see through the windows curious white people stopping in front of the building to listen.

Even if you turn your back on the world you left, you're still pulled toward it, you're still turning around--always--to look behind you. To make sure everyone's okay.

If this moment was a sentence, I'd be the period.

As we dance, I am not Melody, I am a narrative, someone's almost forgotten story. Remembered.

They ate bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, barbecue potato chips, and Oreo cookies sitting on the library steps. Washing it down with Coca-Cola. Years later, Iris wouldn't remember what they talked about as they ate, but she'd remember CathyMarie's laughter, the shape and warmth of her calloused hands.

Back then, that was as far as Iris could see—pregnancy, then birth, then a baby. She hadn't thought of the shame that would force her mother to move them out of Bushwick. Hadn't thought about the baby growing into a child and one day that child becoming her own age—and older than that.

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. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.

But sometimes living pulls back the skin of another life. A possibility.

Being left is easier, elicits more sympathy, gives reason for tears.

When we meet characters in books, fall in love with them, cheer for them, we become more empathetic. More hopeful. More thoughtful about the bigger world.

know now that what is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory.

Feels like a long time ago, but not so far in the past that I don't remember the way that Chicago cold slipped past your bones, I swear. That wind coming off the water? What?!

I swallowed at once envying and adoring all the ways in which the word lovely could refer to my mother. So strange still, how different we were.

I'm just saying it's Prince. And it's my ceremony and he's a genius so why are we even still talking about it? You already nixed the words. Let me at least have the music. Daddy doesn't care. He likes Prince too. Jeez!

God'll make a butt-ugly boy, but I ain't never seen him make a ugly girl child.

Maybe this was the moment when I knew I was part of a long line of almost erased stories. A child of denial. Of magical thinking.

God, how he loved every single cell dividing.

We opened our mouths and let the stories that had burned nearly to ash in our bellies finally live outside of us.

Her deeply tanned skin and dark gray eyes made people look at her, then look at him. She'd always kept her hair cut short, but that year it had grown into loose curls with so much gray and blond moving through it. They didn't match, the two of them. When he held his arm against hers and asked why, she laughed and said, The black ancestors beat the crap out of the white ones and said, Let this baby on through.

Don't even know they're in the presence of royalty when they ask, How come you all sit together? without checking their own all-white tables.

A new fear like a dragging bruise moving in his stomach.