Quotes About Identity

But we do not know yet who we are fighting and what we are fighting for.

When we asked, What do you love? Sylvia looked around her perfectly pink room and said, I'm not the boss of me. How the hell would I even know.

We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico.

Stories can be windows, but also mirrors.

And all the worlds you are - Ohio and Greenville Woodson and Irby Gunnar's Child and Jack's daughter Jehovah's Witness and nonbeliever listener and writer Jackie and Jacqueline - gather into one world called You where You decide what each world and each story and each ending will finally be.

THING ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE," HIS FATHER WAS SAYING. They were driving along the Long Island Ex pressway, heading out to East Hampton. There was a house there his father wanted to look at for his next film. "They don't know they're white. They know what everybody else is, but they don't know they're white." He shook his head and checked his rearview mirror. "It's strange.

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

fabric store, we are not Colored or Negro. We are not thieves or shameful or something to be hidden away. At the fabric store, we're just people.

That's all anybody is-themselves. People all the time wanting to change that.

Our baby brother, Roman, was born pale as dust. His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop people on the street. Whose angel child is this? they want to know. When I say, My brother, the people wear doubt thick as a cape until we smile and the cape falls.

They're all inside of us,...past people and present people. And probably even the people we'll become.

he's not my hero, he's my dad, which means he's my every single thing.

Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn't one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here.

She said she'd chosen Santa Cruz because when se walked around the campus, she blended somehow, no one asking if she was part Negro, no one accusing her of passing for white.

My fingers curl into fists, automatically This is the way, my mother said, of every baby's hand. I do not know if these hands will become Malcolm's—raised and fisted or Martin's—open and asking or James's—curled around a pen.

You the first in your tribe to go to college? Iris shook her head. It was a question about class. She knew that now. It was the what-are-you question. The where and what and who do you come from.

Jacqueline Woodson

That's what up , Amari said. Read those poems in all kinds of American, son.

I do not know if these hands will become Malcolm's—raised and fisted or Martin's—open and asking or James's—curled around a pen. I

And when she says, I love you, too the South is so heavy in her mouth my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I've ever known.

the South is so heavy in her mouth my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I've ever known.

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. August

And when we pressed our heads to each other's hearts how did we not hear Carmen McRae singing? In Angela's fisted hands, Billie Holiday staggered past us and we didn't know her name. Nina Simone told us how beautiful we were and we didn't hear her voice.

One day I'd have full breasts, hips, and large hands. One day, my body would tell the world stories beneath the fabric of my clothes.