Top 120 Jacqueline Woodson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I didn’t just appear one day. I didn’t just wake up and know how to write my name. I keep writing, knowing now that I was a long time coming.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

102. “They had always been soft-spoken. Because they had always been afraid.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

103. “Nothing is like a quarter-mile sprint. All muscle and breath and power. And then it’s over and you got a thing behind you – another race you can clock among your races.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

104. “Would the tragic comedy of memory ever stop replaying?”

— Jacqueline Woodson

105. “When I used to dream about that somebody they never had a face. It was more like a feeling.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

106. “It seemed like someone was always leaving someone, like that’s the way the world worked – people were born and people died, people left and people came. It was like the world was saying you can’t have everything you want at the same time.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

107. “Old people used to always say, You only as old as you feel. Here I am closer to fifty than forty, but I feel older than that most days. Feel like the world is trying to pull me down back into it.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

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

— Jacqueline Woodson

109. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

110. “As the orchestra lifted into “Darling Nikki,” I took small breaths to keep tears from coming. I had not expected this – to feel the close of a chapter. The girlhood of my life over now.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

111. “But it’s what the world does to people. It makes some of us feel ugly and it makes some of us look like criminals, like angry fools.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

112. “Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don’t always do or say what a writer wishes.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

113. “Everything and everyone seemed like it was part of a long-ago time – when I was young and free and living.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

114. “For a long time, my mother’s wasn’t dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story. My father could have given in to the bottle or the needle or a woman and left my brother and me to care for ourselves – or worse, in the care of New York City Children’s Services, where, my father said, there was seldom a happy ending. But this didn’t happen. I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

115. “But now I knew there were so many ways to get hung from a cross – a mother’s love for you morphing into something incomprehensible. A dress ghosted in another generation’s dreams. A history of fire and ash and loss. Legacy.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

116. “When we had finally become friends, when the four of us trusted each other enough to let the world surrounding us into our words, we whispered secrets. Pressed side by side by side, or sitting crossed legged in our newly tight circle. We opened our mouths and let the stories that had burned nearly to ash in our bellies finally live outside of us.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

117. “Who hasn’t walked through a life of small tragedies? ‘Sister Sonja often asked me, as though to understand the depth and breadth of human suffering would be enough to pull me outside of my own.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

118. “Finally sixteen and the moment like a hand holding me out to the world.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

119. “But what is the father of the child supposed to do with his hands? His big open hands. Where were they supposed to go when all they wanted was to reach out for this child hug her, hide her from the world?”

— Jacqueline Woodson

120. “When you have so much real drama in your life, it’s hard to think about fiction.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

121. “When my mother comes home from the hospital with me, my older brother takes one look inside the pink blanket, says, Take her back. We already have one of those. Already.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

122. “Afterward, he had held Iris so tightly. If she hadn’t said, I can’t even breathe right now, he would have still been holding on to her, wanting to pull her inside of him. Even bent in front of the side mirror, just inches from him, Iris still felt too far away.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

123. “Even when my girls were little, we’d go down there, my grandmother tells us. And people’d be marching. The marching didn’t just start yesterday. Police with those dogs, scared everybody near to death. Just once I let my girls march.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

124. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

125. “The Hocking River moves like a flowing arm away from the Ohio River runs through towns as though it’s chasing its own freedom, the same way the Ohio runs north from Virginia until it’s safely away from the South.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

126. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

127. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

128. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

129. “Everyone else has gone away. And now coming back home isn’t really coming back home at all.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

130. “Aunt Lucinda, Miss Bell and whatever neighbor has a breath or two left at the end of the day for sitting and running our mouths.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

131. “I don’t “take a lot of mess.” I have no tolerance for people who are not thinking deeply about things. I have no tolerance for the kind of small talk that people need to fill silence, and I have no tolerance for people not being a part of the world and being in it and trying to change it.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

132. “I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow with each situation I put on the page.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

133. “Nobody ever calls with good news this early in the morning.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

134. “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.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

135. “I should have known that sometimes common sense skips a generation.”

— Jacqueline Woodson

136. “The Bible is big in the religion, treating people as you want to be treated.”

— Jacqueline Woodson