Top 80 Jason Reynolds Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can’t run away from who you are, but what you can do is run toward who you want to be.”

— Jason Reynolds

2. “Dreams don’t have timelines, deadlines, and aren’t always in straight lines.”

— Jason Reynolds

3. “Because for something to make you feel tough, you gotta be a little bit scared of it at first. Then you gotta beat it.” -Ghost.”

— Jason Reynolds

4. “People always love people more when they’re dead.”

— Jason Reynolds

5. “There will come a time when we will love humanity, when we will gain the courage to fight for an equitable society for our beloved humanity, knowing, intelligently, that when we fight for humanity, we are fighting for ourselves.”

— Jason Reynolds

6. “Little. Don’t ever let someone call your life, your dreams, little. Hear me?”

— Jason Reynolds

7. “You love first, and that’s always a good thing.”

— Jason Reynolds

8. “We can’t attack a thing we don’t know. That’s dangerous. And... foolish. It would be like trying to chop down a tree from the top of it. If we understand how the tree works, how the trunk and roots are where the power lies, and how gravity is on our side, we can attack it, each of us with small axes, and change the face of the the forest.”

— Jason Reynolds

9. “Just remember, when you’re walking in the nighttime, make sure the nighttime ain’t walking into you.”

— Jason Reynolds

10. “But if the blood inside you is on the inside of someone else, you never want to see it on the outside of them.”

— Jason Reynolds

11. “I should probably introduce myself. My name is Patina Jones. And I ain’t no junk. I also ain’t no hair flipper. And most of the girls at Chester Academy are hair flippers who be looking at me like my mom some kind of junk maker.”

— Jason Reynolds

12. “Sometimes, when people get treated as less than human, the best way to help them feel better is to simply treat them as human. Not as victims. Just you as you. Rashad Butler, before all this.”

— Jason Reynolds

13. “I do believe we can do better, be better. But we can’t hide behind fear. We can’t tuck truth between the cushions of comfort. We have to deal with it, really confront it, so that our children can live with a lot less weight. We owe it to them.”

— Jason Reynolds

14. “I wanted him to know that I saw him, a guy who, even with a tear-streaked face, seemed to have two tiny smiles framing his eyes like parentheses, a guy on the ground pantomiming his death to remind the world he was alive.”

— Jason Reynolds

15. “The most addictive drug known to America. Racism. It causes wealth, an inflated sense of self, and hallucinations.”

— Jason Reynolds

16. “You, my dear, should spend more time in a library. It’s not just a hiding place, but also the place where the chases happen.”

— Jason Reynolds

17. “There are lazy, hardworking, wise, unwise, harmless, and harmful individuals of every race, but no racial group is better or worse than another racial group in any way.”

— Jason Reynolds

18. “Trouble is, you can’t run away from yourself.” Coach snatched the towel from his shoulder, folded into a perfect square, and set it in the space between us. “Unfortunately,” he said, “ain’t nobody that fast.”

— Jason Reynolds

19. “Had our hearts really become so numb that we needed dead bodies in order to feel the beat of compassion in our chests? Who am I if I need to be shocked back into my best self?”

— Jason Reynolds

20. “Light always wins.”

— Jason Reynolds

21. “Not like KKK racist,” she said. “I don’t think most people think they’re racist. But every time something like this happens, you could, like you said, say, ‘Not my problem.’ You could say, ‘It’s a one-time thing.’ Every time it happened.”

— Jason Reynolds

22. “We needed to talk, plain and simple. And seeing as through she was texting me, she clearly was opening the door. I just had to be man enough to walk through it.”

— Jason Reynolds

23. “To know the past is to know the present. To know the present is to know yourself.”

— Jason Reynolds

24. “History can only teach its lesson if it is remembered.”

— Jason Reynolds

25. “How do you small-talk your father when “dad” is a language so foreign that whenever you try to say it, it feels like you got a third lip and a second tongue?”

— Jason Reynolds

26. “So this was about you saving somebody, huh? Yeah, well, let me ask you something, Super Hero... Who’s gonna save you?”

— Jason Reynolds

27. “Like I was holding my breath. Maybe I was. Maybe I was hoping I could give some back to Shawn.”

— Jason Reynolds

28. “If we understand how the tree works, how the trunk and roots are where the power lies, and how gravity is on our side, we can attack it, each of us with small axes, and change the face of the forest. So let’s learn all there is to know about the tree of racism. The root. The fruit. The sap and trunk. The nests built over time, the changing leaves. That way, your generation can finally, actively chop it down.”

— Jason Reynolds

29. “Weird talking to my dad like he was a stranger even though we hugged like family.”

— Jason Reynolds

30. “Shawn turned back toward me, eyes dull from death but shining from tears, finally spoke to me. Just two words, like a joke he’d been saving. YOU COMING?”

— Jason Reynolds

31. “But you know how death is. Your body goes but your ideas don’t. Your impact lingers on even when it’s poisonous. Some bodies get put into the ground and daisies bloom. Others encourage the sprouting of weeds. Weeds that work to strangle whatever’s living, and growing, around them.”

— Jason Reynolds

32. “You can’t be out there saving the world when your neighborhood ain’t event straight.”

— Jason Reynolds

33. “Nobody says the words anymore, but somehow the violence still remains. If I didn’t want the violence to remain, I had to do a hell of a lot more than just say the right things and not say the wrong things.”

— Jason Reynolds

34. “It’s so weird how a person can be a normal part of your everyday life, and then just disappear. And when they do, you realize that some of those everyday things go with them. Like the smell of food cooking.”

— Jason Reynolds

35. “If only is what’s circling in my mind every morning before I breathe in beauty and breathe out bad decisions; If only is the cool breeze before I spin the world apart.”

— Jason Reynolds

36. “I mean, I had seen this happen so many times. Not personally, but on TV. In the news. People getting beaten, and sometimes killed, by the cops, and then there’s all this fuss about it, only to build up to a big heartbreak when nothing happens. The cops get off. And everybody cries and waits for the next dead kid, to do it all over again. That’s the way the story goes. A different kind of Lifetime movie. I didn’t want all that. Didn’t need it.”

— Jason Reynolds

37. “And sometimes,” he continued while flipping another one, “I can lose and lose and lose and I don’t know why. But there’s nothing I can do but just keep flipping the cards. Eventually, I’ll win again. As long as you got cards to keep turning, you’re fine. Now, that’s life,” he said, pushing another hand I won over to me.”

— Jason Reynolds

38. “Mr. Ray had no problems opening the door, but he just couldn’t close it, as my dad would say.”

— Jason Reynolds

39. “Bullies should be snitched on, especially if you don’t feel like you can back them down.”

— Jason Reynolds

40. “Racist ideas cause people to look at an innocent Black face and see a criminal.”

— Jason Reynolds

41. “In Case you Ain’t Know, gunshots make everybody deaf and blind especially when they make somebody dead. Best to become invisible in times like these. Everybody knows that. Even Tony flew away.”

— Jason Reynolds

42. “It had been a few days since everything went down, and when you’re used to hanging out with a person every single day, a few days off can sometimes seem more like a few months.”

— Jason Reynolds

43. “Miles fired the shooter at the TV, a wad of web turning it on. Ganke shook his head. “So lazy.”

— Jason Reynolds

44. “So I couldn’t help but worry, even when I felt like he didn’t deserve my worry anymore.”

— Jason Reynolds

45. “The discomfort seemed to lower the ceiling...”

— Jason Reynolds

46. “Black Power was met by a new slogan, one spat out like a racist slur. Law and order.”

— Jason Reynolds

47. “The stupidest name for a sport is football. Why isn’t it called tackleball? Real football is soccer. Soccer is the second-stupidest name for a sport, unless it was the name for female boxing. But female boxing is already called boxing, even though boxing should be the sport to see who can pack up stuff, like clothes, the fastest. Why isn’t that a sport? If it was a sport, Ma would be a world-champion boxer.”

— Jason Reynolds

48. “He always walks like the sidewalk was put there just for his feet.”

— Jason Reynolds

49. “What it was like to love something enough to do anything to come back to it.”

— Jason Reynolds

50. “I know people mean well when they ask those kinds of questions, but at the end of the day, they are stupid questions. How am I feeling? Well, let me think. My mother’s funeral was a couple days ago, so I damn sure ain’t happy.”

— Jason Reynolds