Top 120 Jacqueline Woodson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

52. “How can I explain to anyone that stories are like air to me, I breathe them in and let them out over and over again.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

53. “Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone – adults promising us their own failed futures.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

54. “I watched my brother watch the world, his sharp, too-serious brow furrowing down in both angst and wonder. Everywhere 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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

55. “My whole family knows I can’t sing. My voice, my sister says, is just left of the key. Just right of the tune. But I sing anyway, whenever I can.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

56. “I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

57. “Does it sound crazy to say I looked at her and saw the world falling into some kind of order that I didn’t even know it was out of?”

— Jacqueline Woodson

58. “Stories can be windows, but also mirrors.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

59. “Fifteen. Sixteen was probably something, but fifteen – fifteen was a place between here and nowhere.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

60. “I think I’d rather have my heart broke than do the breaking. – Lena.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

61. “Imagine, my brother signed. Imagine if somebody built a bridge right outside our window and we could just walk across the highway and be on the other side.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

62. “And it’s not even strange that it feels the way it’s always felt like the place we belong to. Like home.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

63. “My sister’s clear soft voice opens up the world to me. I lean in so hungry for it.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

64. “Something about memory. It takes you back to where you were and lets you just be there for a time.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

65. “Maybe this was our last summer as best friends. I feel like something’s going to change now and I’m not going to be able to change it back. – Margaret.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

66. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

67. “Ms. Johnson says each day holds its own memory – its own moments that we can write about later. She says we should always look for the moments and some of them might be perfect, filled with light and hope and laughter. Moments that stay with us forever and ever.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

68. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

69. “I held on to my mama’s Spelman College sweater. Wore it the first day I got there myself and still have it now. Held on to my own daddy’s stethoscope until I pulled it out of its black leather case one winter and saw the rubber had melted into sticky pieces of nothing and the silver disk was flaked with rust. Seems all I had from them was the memories of fire and smoke.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

70. “Seems like every time life starts straightening itself out, something’s gotta go and happen.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

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

— Jacqueline Woodson

72. “And as we stood half circle in the bright school yard, we saw the lost and beautiful and hungry in each of us. We saw home.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

73. “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

74. “But once, a cardinal alighted on the kitchen windowsill and he found himself squinting long after it had flown away again, trying hard to hold on to its beauty.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

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

— Jacqueline Woodson

76. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

77. “Maybe this was love – wanting someone with all the senses.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

78. “That’s why I don’t buy it when people say children don’t know. That they’re too young to understand. If they can walk and talk, they can understand. You look at how much growing a baby does in the first few years of its life – crawling, walking, talking, laughing. The brain just changing and changing. You can’t tell me all of it’s not becoming a part of their blood. Their memory.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

79. “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?”

— Jacqueline Woodson

80. “Age will do that to you. Soon as something starts coming to your mind, it snatches it back. Makes you forget the stuff you want to remember. Brings back the memories you’re busy trying to forget.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

81. “That’s what makes best friends. It’s not whether or not you live on the same block or go to the same school, but how you feel about each other in your hearts.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

82. “When you’re 15, pain skips over reason, aims right for the marrow.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

83. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

84. “I’m not afraid of silence. You know, I’m not afraid to sit in a room and have the conversation drop into silence. I think that’s a very southern thing.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

85. “Some days I just think the whole world and life and everything is stupid. And that’s ’cause I be missing you.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

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

— Jacqueline Woodson

87. “Some evenings I don’t know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

88. “You got something you love, little man? Then you good. You love food? You cook. You love clothes? You design. You love the wind and water? You sail.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

89. “But damn, am I hella tired, Iris. Hella tired.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

90. “Who hasn’t walked through a life of small tragedies?”

— Jacqueline Woodson

91. “When boys called our names, we said ‘Don’t even say my name. Don’t even put it in your mouth.’ When they said, ‘You ugly anyway,’ we knew they were lying. When they hollered, ‘Conceited!’ we said, ‘No- convinced!’ We watched them dip-walk away, too young to know how to respond. The four of us together wasn’t something they understood. They understood girls alone, folding their arms across their breasts, praying for invisibility.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

92. “But she didn’t believe in God. Or Jesus. Or Satan. Or prayer. I believe in words, she said. I believe in numbers and all the history I understand. I believe in things I can see. When he was a little boy she used to hug him and say, And man-oh-man how I believe in you, Aubrey. My love. My light. My life.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

93. “First they brought us here. Then we worked for free. Then it was 1863, and we were supposed to be free but we weren’t. And that’s why people are so mad.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

94. “Two steps to the left or right or back or front and you’re standing outside your life.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

95. “So why was he feeling like this? Why was he feeling like some promise the universe made had been broken?”

— Jacqueline Woodson

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

— Jacqueline Woodson

97. “Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow. – Langston Hughes.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

98. “Some people don’t believe that you can meet a person and know that’s the person for you for the rest of your life. I’m not going to try to argue with them on that. I know what I know.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

99. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

100. “Probably still believed that if you wished hard enough you could make the impossible happen.”

— Jacqueline Woodson