Jacqueline Woodson quotes

Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together. (Jacqueline Woodson)

People are going to judge you all the time no matter what you do...Don't worry about other people. Worry about you.

Jacqueline Woodson

Even the silence has a story to tell you. Just listen. Listen.

Jacqueline Woodson

In all your getting, get understanding.

Jacqueline Woodson

Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.

Jacqueline Woodson

I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.

Jacqueline Woodson

The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.

Jacqueline Woodson

To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.

Jacqueline Woodson

I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called.

Jacqueline Woodson

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

Jacqueline Woodson

The empty swing set reminds us of this--
that bad won't be bad forever,
and what is good can sometimes last
a long, long time. (Jacqueline Woodson)

Sometimes... you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.

Jacqueline Woodson

You're a part of me... You're in my heart. Forever and always, all right? -D.

Jacqueline Woodson

I think only once in your life do you find someone that you say, "Hey, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my time on this earth with." And if you miss it, or walk away from it, or even maybe, blink - it's gone.

Jacqueline Woodson

I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide...I feel like change is coming, and change sometimes comes too slow for a lot of us. But it comes.

Jacqueline Woodson

I think what happened was the language settled in me much deeper than it settled into people who just can read something once and absorb what they absorb of it. I feel like what I was absorbing was not by any means superficial. And I think I was - from a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for this deep understanding of the literature not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page...

Jacqueline Woodson

I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.

Jacqueline Woodson

I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.

Jacqueline Woodson

I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.

Jacqueline Woodson

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, 'Instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.'

Jacqueline Woodson

You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back. (Jacqueline Woodson)

Everything I write, I read out loud. It has to sound a certain way. It has to look a certain way on the page.

Jacqueline Woodson

I couldnt be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because Im pretty optimistic.

Jacqueline Woodson

I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much...so, so much.

Jacqueline Woodson