Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

This earth is seventy percent water. Hard not to walk into it.

Sometimes you do have to laugh to keep from crying. And sometimes the world feels all right and good and kind of like it's becoming nice again around you. And you realize it, and realize how happy you are in it, and you just gotta laugh.

Fifteen. Sixteen was probably something, but fifteen - fifteen was a place between here and nowhere.

Something about memory. It takes you back to where you were and lets you just be there for a time.

I feel like the world stopped. And I got off...and then it started spinning again, but too fast for me to hop back on. I feel like I'm still trying to get a...to get some kind of foothold on living

That's what makes best friends. It's not whether or not you live on the same block or go to the same school, but how you feel about each other in your hearts.

Mama was always saying I was a brain snob, that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?

There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death's enormity.

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

If you come as softly as the wind within the trees. You may hear what I hear. See what sorrow sees. If you come as lightly as threading dew, I will take you gladly, nor ask more of you.

It's easier to make up stories than it is to write them down. When I speak, the words come pouring out of me. The story wakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair, crosses one leg over the other, says, Let me introduce myself. Then just starts going on and on.

Age will do that to you. Soon as something starts coming to your mind, it snatches it back. Makes you forget the stuff you want to remember. Brings back the memories you're busy trying to forget.

I don't know," he said softly. "I look into the future and I don't see anything else. It's like it's this big blank space where I should be.

Thing about white people," Jeremiah's father tells him, "they know what everybody else is, but they don't know they're white" - "Maybe some know it" His father eyed him and smiled "When they walk into a party and everyone's black, they know it. Or when they get caught in Harlem after nightfall, they know it. But otherwise...

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

Some people don't believe that you can meet a person and know that's the person for you for the rest of your life. I'm not going to try to argue with them on that. I know what I know.

Write down what I think I know. The knowing will come. Just keep listening...

And as we stood half circle in the bright school yard, we saw the lost and beautiful and hungry in each of us. We saw home.

Racism doesn't know color, death doesn't know age, and pain doesn't know might.

If someone had taken that book out of my hand said, You're too old for this maybe I'd never have believed that someone who looked like me could be in the pages of the book that someone who looked like me had a story.

I'm gonna kiss you in each room," he said. "Then it's dinnertime." "How many rooms to this place?" Ellie asked, her eyes wide. Miah shrugged. "I'm not counting.

Love changes and changes. Then it changes again. . .

If the worst thing in the world happened, would I help protect someone else? Would I let myself be a harbor for someone who needs it?' Then she said, 'I want each of you to say to the other: I will harbor you.' I will harbor you.

Some days I just think the whole world and life and everything is stupid. And that's 'cause I be missing you.