Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

My kids speak of both subtle slights and blatant racism. It's a narrative I never imagined for them.

I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.

Who are you without your girls? I truly believe that. Who are you without the people who help you make sense of the misogyny, the racism, the economic struggle, all of it? You need those people saying you're a good mom, a great writer. You're a great dresser. You cook well. Whatever the beauty is that you need to hear.

I wrote all the time, and I had teachers who encouraged it.

I think there is much more queer visibility than there was when I was a kid. There is marriage, more trans visibility, and many more celebrities who are open about the sexuality. This was so not the case when I was a kid.

Until I was about 13, Manhattan had been a world seen from its edges.

Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies?

Maybe this was our last summer as best friends. I feel like something's going to change now and I'm not going to be able to change it back. —Margaret

If I loved someone enough, I would go anywhere in the world with them." —Staggerlee

This is what kindness does, Ms.Albert said. Each little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world.

We all have the same dream, my grandmother says. To live equal in a country that's supposed to be the land of the free. She lets out a long breath, deep remembering.

Lately, I'd been feeling like I was standing outside watching everything and everybody. Wishing I could take the part of me that was over there and the part of me that was over here and push them together—make myself into one whole person like everybody else.

You have those walls up all around you...Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?

No matter how big you get, it's still okay to cry because everybody's got a right to their own tears.

Look how beautifully black we are. And as we dance, I am not Melody who is sixteen, I am not my parents' once illegitimate daughter—I am a narrative, someone's almost forgotten story. Remembered.

Mama says it's okay to be on the quiet side—if quiet means you're listening, watching, taking it all in.

Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone—adults promising us their own failed futures.

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?

Y'all know how much I love you? "Infinity and back again," I say the way I've said it a million times. And then, daddy says to me, "go on and add a little bit more to that.

He wondered where that stuff went to, where love went to, how a person could just love somebody one day and boom –- the next day love somebody else.

This is how the time moves - an hour here, a day somewhere, and then it's night and then it's morning. A clock ticking on a shelf. A small child running to school, a father coming home. Time moves over us and past us, and the feeling of lips pressed against lips fades into memory. A picture yellows at its edges. A phone rings in an empty room.

Will the words end, I ask whenever I remember to. Nope, my sister says, all of five years old now, and promising me infinity.

Nothing in the world is like this- a bright white page with pale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencil the soft hush of it moving finally one day into letters.

I am not gifted. When I read, the words twist twirl across the page. When they settle, it is too late. The class has already moved on. I want to catch words one day. I want to hold them then blow gently, watch them float right out of my hands.