Quotes from Jacqueline Woodson

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.

I think I'd rather have my heart broke than do the breaking. —Lena

I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone?

In downtown Greenville, they painted over the WHITE ONLY signs, except on the bathroom doors, they didn't use a lot of paint so you can still see the words, right there like a ghost standing in front still keeping you out.

Some evenings, I kneel toward Mecca with my uncle. Maybe Mecca is the place Leftie goes to in his mind, when the memory of losing his arm becomes too much. Maybe Mecca is good memories, presents and stories and poetry and arroz con pollo and family and friends... Maybe Mecca is the place everyone is looking for... It's out there in front of you, my uncle says. I know I'll know it when I get there.

Orba (feminine), the Latin word for orphaned, parentless, childless, widowed. 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. But it has. Orbus, orba, orbum, orbi, orbae, orborum, orbo, orbis...

Seems like every time life starts straightening itself out, something's gotta go and happen.

In our yearbook, there is a picture of me and Miah - sitting in Central Park - Miah has his lips poked out and is about to kiss me on my cheek. And I'm looking straight into the camera laughing. Two and half years have passed, and still, this is how I remember us. This is how I will always remember us. And I know when I look at that picture, when I think back to those few months with Miah, that I did not miss the moment.

And when I can't speak it, I write it down. I wish I was different. Wish I was taller, smarter, could talk out loud the way I write things down. I wish I didn't always feel like I was on the outside, looking in like a Peeping Tom.

Someday somebody's going to come along and knock this old fence down.

Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes.

Fast nights make long days

I love that people think the world is even halfway ready for what we about to bring.

I am born as the South explodes, too many people too many years enslaved, then emancipated but not free, the people who look like me keep fighting and marching and getting killed so that today— February 12, 1963 and every day from this moment on, brown children like me can grow up free. Can grow up learning and voting and walking and riding wherever we want. I am born in Ohio but the stories of South Carolina already run like rivers through my veins.

Back then, we still all believed in happy endings. None of us knew yet how many endings and beginnings one story could have.

I would never trust her. Not one hundred percent. Not the way some people can trust their mothers.

Kids are something. All they can see is the beauty in a moment.

But I don't want to read faster or older or any way else that might make the story disappear too quickly from where it's settling inside my brain, slowly becoming a part of me. A story I will remember long after I've read it for the second, third, tenth, hundredth time.

At the day's end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and the way light filters into and out of a scene. The deeper messages often escape her.Sometimes I take for granted the journey through the telling. At other times I curse the muse's power. But through it all, I live each day in deep gratitude.

No past. No future. Just this perfect Now.

And freedom? Oh, freedom. Well that's just some people talking. Your prison is walking through this world all alone.

This is the way brown people have to fight, my grandfather says. You can't just put your fist up. You have to insist on something gently. Walk toward a thing slowly. But be ready to die, my grandfather says, for what is right. Be ready to die, my grandfather says, for everything you believe in.

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.

In your life, if you're lucky enough, you are born during a moment in time when the world is ready for the change you're bringing.