Jacqueline Woodson Quotes - Page 2

When I'm writing flawed characters, I just think about my own flaws.

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.

Keep on doing what you're doing.

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

That's what writing is. It's moving past your fear.

I think that happens for a lot of people, they have this idea that there's only one type of way to write poetry and that you have to have this information. You have to know about meter, you have to know about form, you have to know about iambic pentameter, and all of that.

I love slow readers. And readers who think about what I've written, think about how it's written - and copy me!

I think people need to remember that a book isn't done after a few rewrites and a publisher isn't going to buy an 'undone' book so the hard part is making it a book that at least ten other people want to pay for to read.

I feel like so much of what I'm doing is making a road where there is no road and inviting people on that road with me. It's scary. It's scary, but I can't listen to the voices that are saying form is the only way, or that there is only this kind of form or that kind of form.

A lot of times, when people send me books to read - new writers mostly - I find that the book is still in a draft stage and that before it can leave the writer's hands and head to a publisher, it needs about five more revisions. Some people don't want to do that.

You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.

Sometimes, I don't know that words for things, how to write down the feeling of knowing that every dying person leaves something behind.

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

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.

For me as a writer, it was understanding that we're so far behind in our way of dealing with death. We put someone in the ground, we bury them or we burn them, and then we're supposed to just move on and kind of get over it.

Sometimes it seems as though not a moment has moved, but then you look up and you're already old or you already have a household of kids or you look down and see your feet are miles and miles away from the rest of you—and you realize you've grown up.

I actually don't think of whiteness and heterosexuality as 'the norm'. Maybe there are people who still do but none of them are close friends of mine.

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

I rewrite my books until they're mostly memorized so that's a lot of rewrites, a lot of time spent with my stories.

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

There is so much work left to be done in the world and for me, I am hoping to make the change I can and do the work I need to do through this gift I've been given.

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.

I definitely believe in a greater good. I definitely believe that there's a reason each of us is here and that we've been brought here to do something. And we need to get busy doing it. And I definitely believe that there is something moving us forward that's good.

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

I think I had gotten messages really young that poetry wasn't for me, that it was for, basically, some dead white men. My experience and my intellect was on the outside of understanding that. I think that's what's so destructive.