Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

They laughed at Eddie Murphy movies, and on the now too rare occasion when Iris let him make love to her, it felt like their bodies were holding on to the earth. When he kissed her, he wanted her to swallow him, wanted to be all the way inside of her—his love was deep like that.

Each day, her sore and swollen body pressed against a hard wind blowing her own eyes closed. At night she went in and out of fitful sleeps, woke in the dark, sweaty and struggling for air. Where had the air gone?

I do know that as the novel takes shape on the page, it's hard for characters' lives not to intersect with the writer's own life. As we unpack our characters' stories and actions, it's hard not to unpack our own history.

When I took these things from the house: some tapes, some books, my winter clothes, I did not know that these would become the things I own.

Iris didn't understand his happiness. How this was so absolutely enough for him.

Somehow, my brother and I grew up motherless yet halfway whole. My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.

I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame - of everything.

Our land moved in grassy waves toward the water. The land ended at the water. Maybe my mother had forgotten this. And kept on walking.

He felt like he had lost something. Something more than his virginity. Like something had been taken from him and he could never get it back. He felt like a punk thinking this. Iris had given it up to him. So why was he feeling like this? Why was he feeling like some promise the universe made had been broken? Damn.

Let's say it's rain--the people who got problems with us being together--let's call them and their problems rain." Ellie nodded. "Okay, they're rain." She smiled. "So now what?" "So it's not always raining, is it? But when it's not raining, we know the rain isn't gone forever.

My brother drove me to the subway, kissed my forehead, and hugged me hard. When had he become a man? For so long, he had been my little brother, sweet and solemn, his eyes open wide to the world. Now, behind small wire-rimmed glasses, he looked like a figure out of history. Malcolm maybe. Or Stokely.

When the trumpeter picked up a solo and the music lifted past where the voices had just been, I felt like my ribs were shattering. There was so much in all of it. Just. So. Much. I wanted to say to Iris, It all feels like it's trying to drift out into somebody's eternity.

The green of Tennessee faded quickly into the foreign world of Brooklyn, heat rising from cement. I thought of my mother often, lifting my hand to stroke my own cheek, imagining her beside me, explaining this newness, the fast pace of it, the impenetrable gray of it. When my brother cried, I shushed him, telling him not to worry. She's coming soon, I said, trying to echo her. She's coming tomorrow. And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

When you're young and your mother leaves, something inside of you fills up with the absence of her. I don't know how to explain. For a long time, there was this place inside of me where love for Marion should have been but wasn't.

In Tennessee, honeysuckle vines bloomed thick and full in our yard every summer. My brother and I ran out in the early hours, barefooted and still in pajamas to suck the sweetness from the bright flowers. It was never enough. That faint hint of honeysuckle on the tongue an almost broken promise of something better hidden somewhere deeper.

I think of it..." Jeremiah said slowly. "Like weather or something. You got your rain, your snow, your sunshine. Always changing but still constant, you know?"... "So it's not always raining, is it? But when it's not raining, we know the rain isn't gone forever.

People are so caught up in trying to force their own world onto everybody else's that they don't even get the fact that the other person doesn't care.

I wanted to climb into her world and live in it with her. She was beautiful and kind and funny and identified as "certified crazy." I learned that certified crazy meant nothing to lose, nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be self-conscious about.

Each door, each friend, each step—bringing me closer to who I was becoming.

what I'm remembering now is her smile, the way she turned it on people and seemed to make them stutter. I was nineteen and had zero idea what this meant—this power, this deep confidence

Once I asked Miah if he ever forgot he was black. No. I never forget, he said. But sometimes it doesn't matter-like I just am. Then he asked me if I ever forgot I was white. Sometimes, I said. And when you're forgetting, what color are you? No color. Then Miah looked away from me and said, We're different that way.

So after the tears were all cried out, it was time to move on and figure out what to do with all that was coming at me.

But on paper, things can live forever. On paper, a butterfly never dies.

That's what writing is. It's moving past your fear.