Top 120 Jacqueline Woodson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

Featured in: Encouraging Quotes for Students, Diversity Quotes

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

— Jacqueline Woodson

3. “In all your getting, get understanding.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

4. “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

5. “No past. No future. Just this perfect Now.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

6. “I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called Now.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

7. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

8. “Racism doesn’t know color, death doesn’t know age, and pain doesn’t know might.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

9. “From a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for the 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

10. “We all have the same dream, my grandmother says. To live equal in a country that’s supposed to be the land of the free. She lets out a long breath, deep remembering.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

11. “You can’t always be pushing people away. Someday nobody’ll come back.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

12. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

13. “I want to write this down, that the revolution is like a merry-go-round, history always being made somewhere. And maybe for a short time, we’re a part of that history. And then the ride stops and our turn is over.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

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

— Jacqueline Woodson

15. “Somewhere in my brain each laugh, tear and lullaby becomes memory.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

16. “Mama says it’s okay to be on the quiet side – if quiet means you’re listening, watching, taking it all in.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

17. “I work hard, he says, I treat people like I want to be treated. God sees this, God knows.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

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

— Jacqueline Woodson

19. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

20. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

21. “Letters becoming words, words gathering meaning, becoming thoughts outside my head becoming sentences written by Jacqueline Amanda Woodson.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

22. “Look how beautifully black we are. And as we dance, I am not Melody who is sixteen, I am not my parents’ once illegitimate daughter – I am a narrative, someone’s almost forgotten story. Remembered.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

23. “I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

24. “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?”

— Jacqueline Woodson

25. “There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

26. “Guess that’s where the tears came from, knowing that there’s so much in this great big world that you don’t have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you’ll have one less heartbreak in your life. Oh Lord. Some evenings I don’t know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Fells like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

27. “A front porch swing thirsty for oil.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

28. “He loved October. Had always loved it. There was something sad and beautiful about it – the ending and beginning of things.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

29. “She felt red at the bone – like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

30. “The empty swing set reminds us of this – that what is bad won’t be bad forever, and what is good can sometimes last a long, long time.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

31. “We were four girls together, amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

32. “I didn’t know it would be people you barely knew becoming friends that harbored you. And dreams you didn’t even know you had – coming true. I didn’t know it would be superpowers rising up out of tragedies, and perfect moments in a nearly empty classroom.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

33. “At night, every living thing competes for a chance to be heard. The crickets and frogs call out. Sometimes, there’s the soft who-whoo of an owl lost amid the pines. Even the dogs won’t rest until they’ve howled at the moon. But the crickets always win, long after the frogs stop croaking and the owl has found its way home. Long after the dogs have lain down losing the battle against sleep, the crickets keep going as though they know their song is our lullaby.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

34. “Maybe, I am thinking, there is something hidden like this, in all of us. A small gift from the universe waiting to be discovered.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

35. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

36. “I want to catch words one day. I want to hold them then blow gently, watch them float right out of my hands.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

37. “When you love a thing, little man, my dad said, you gotta love it with everything you got. Till you can’t even tell where that thing you love begins and where you end.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

38. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

39. “Tragedy is strange. It takes away. And it gives too” -Haley.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

40. “I lifted my head to look up into the changing leaves, thinking how at some point, we were all headed home. At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

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

— Jacqueline Woodson

42. “Every since he was a little boy, his father had always warned him about running in white neighborhoods. Once, when he was about ten, he had torn away from his father and taken off down Madison Avenue. When his father caught up to him, he grabbed Miah’s shoulder. Don’t you ever run in a white neighborhood, he’d whispered fiercely, tears in his eyes. Then he had pulled Miah toward him and held him. Ever.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

43. “Y’all know how much I love you? “Infinity and back again,” I say the way I’ve said it a million times. And then, daddy says to me, “go on and add a little bit more to that.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

44. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

45. “When there are many worlds you can choose the one you walk into each day.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

46. “For God so loved the world, their father would say, he gave his only begotten son. But what about his daughters, I wondered. What did God do with his daughters?”

— Jacqueline Woodson

47. “I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame – of everything.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

48. “If this moment was a sentence, I’d be the period.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

49. “He would give his own life to see Melody able to stay this young, to see her live her teenage life – all the years. He wanted to pull her to him now. Say, Hold on to yourself, Melody. Don’t get lost. He wanted to say again what he’d said to her so many times before. You’re loved, baby, you’re loved.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

50. “No matter how big you get, it’s still okay to cry because everybody’s got a right to their own tears.”

— Jacqueline Woodson