Top 100 Jesmyn Ward Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What’s done in the dark always comes to the light.”

— Jesmyn Ward

2. “I believe there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives, through words.”

— Jesmyn Ward

3. “The act of reading outside of your experience increases empathy. It broadens our understanding of humanity and our ideas about who we are and about what we can be.”

— Jesmyn Ward

4. “Grief doesn’t fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.”

— Jesmyn Ward

5. “Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up.”

— Jesmyn Ward

6. “The memory is a living thing – it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives – the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead. –from One Writer’s Beginnings, by Eudora Welty.”

— Jesmyn Ward

7. “I like to think I know what death is.”

— Jesmyn Ward

8. “I’m a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.”

— Jesmyn Ward

9. “I feel like I lost a game I didn’t know I was playing.”

— Jesmyn Ward

10. “He taught me love is stronger than death.”

— Jesmyn Ward

11. “While I’ve said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about the South.”

— Jesmyn Ward

12. “It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it.”

— Jesmyn Ward

13. “Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.”

— Jesmyn Ward

14. “I don’t know if it’s something I did. Or if it’s something that’s in Leonie. But she ain’t got the mothering instinct. I knew when you was little and we was out shopping, and she bought herself something to eat and ate it right in front of you, and you was sitting there crying hungry. I knew then.”

— Jesmyn Ward

15. “Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants. Once a year or so, I see it in Pop, how he got leaner and leaner with age, the tendons in him standing out, harder and more rigid, every year. His Indian cheekbones severe. But since Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that, too.”

— Jesmyn Ward

16. “It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”

— Jesmyn Ward

17. “To give life... is to know what’s worth fighting for. And what’s love.”

— Jesmyn Ward

18. “It feels good to be mean, to speak past the baby I can’t hit and let that anger touch another. The one I’m never good enough for.”

— Jesmyn Ward

19. “And it was easier to let him keep on touching me than ask him to stop, easier to let him inside than to push him away, easier than hearing him ask me, “Why not?” It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer.”

— Jesmyn Ward

20. “There’s things that move a man. Like currents of water inside. Things he can’t help. Older I got, the more I found it true. What’s in Stag is like water so black and deep you can’t see the bottom.”

— Jesmyn Ward

21. “I miss her so badly I have to swallow salt, imagine it running like lemon juice into the fresh cut that is my chest, feel it sting.”

— Jesmyn Ward

22. “Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.”

— Jesmyn Ward

23. “By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.”

— Jesmyn Ward

24. “The sky has turned the color of sandy red clay: orange cream. The heat of the day at its heaviest: the insects awoken from their winter slumber. I cannot bear the world.”

— Jesmyn Ward

25. “I didn’t understand time, either, when I was young. How could I know that after I died, Parchman would pull me from the sky? How could I imagine Parchman would pull me to it and refuse to let go? And how could I conceive that Parchman was past, present and future all at once? That the history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness would show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once?”

— Jesmyn Ward

26. “There’s too much blank sky where a tree once stood.”

— Jesmyn Ward

27. “Home ain’t always about a place. The house I grew up in is gone, ain’t nothin’ but a field and some woods but even if the house was still there – it ain’t about that. I don’t know. Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time.”

— Jesmyn Ward

28. “There’s so many,′ Richie says. His voice is molasses slow. ‘So many of us,’ he says. ‘Hitting. The wrong keys. Wandering against. The song.”

— Jesmyn Ward

29. “Men’s bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend he circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural.”

— Jesmyn Ward

30. “We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were still alive even as we did everything to die.”

— Jesmyn Ward

31. “Lot of folks was in there for stealing food because everybody was poor and starving, and even though White people couldn’t get your work for free, they did everything they could to avoid hiring you and paying you for it.”

— Jesmyn Ward

32. “Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and I wake up and it ain’t changed none. It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”

— Jesmyn Ward

33. “Medea kills her brother. In the beginning, she is known by her nephew, who tells the Argonauts about her, for having power, for helping her family, just like I tried to help Skeet on the day China first got sick from the Ivomec. But for Medea, love makes help turn wrong.”

— Jesmyn Ward

34. “I knew that I lived in a place where hope and a sense of possibility were as ephemeral as morning fog, but I did not see the despair at the heart of our drug use.”

— Jesmyn Ward

35. “After I left New York, I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn’t fade. Grief scabs over like scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are never free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.”

— Jesmyn Ward

36. “You my baby.” She breathes heavy, and the grate cracks and sinks to rusted stillness. “Like I drew the veil back so you could walk in this life, you’ll help me draw it back so I can walk in the next.”

— Jesmyn Ward

37. “This baby got plenty of daddies. – Esch.”

— Jesmyn Ward

38. “Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly.”

— Jesmyn Ward

39. “Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was.”

— Jesmyn Ward

40. “The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow up our playground.”

— Jesmyn Ward

41. “I hope I fed you enough. While I’m here. So you carry it with you. Like a camel.′ I can hear the smile in her voice, faint. A baring of teeth. ‘Maybe that ain’t a good way of putting it. Like a well, Jojo. Pull that water up when you need it.”

— Jesmyn Ward

42. “But another part of me wants to shake Jojo and Michaela awake, to lean down and yell so they startle and sit up so I don’t have to see the way they turn to each other like plants following the sun across the sky. They are each other’s light.”

— Jesmyn Ward

43. “I burn, and I hope.”

— Jesmyn Ward

44. “There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned a hose on full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding. This is love, and it hurts.”

— Jesmyn Ward

45. “But it was impossible to not hear the animals, because I looked at them and understood, instantly, and it was like looking at a sentence and understanding the words, all of it coming to me at once.”

— Jesmyn Ward

46. “I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don’t think I’m very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.”

— Jesmyn Ward

47. “No, she love you. She don’t know how to show it. And her love for herself and her love for Michael – well, it gets in the way. It confuse her.”

— Jesmyn Ward

48. “It was easier and harder to be male; men were given more freedom but threatened with less freedom.”

— Jesmyn Ward

49. “Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless.”

— Jesmyn Ward

50. “But the wind grabs my voice up and snatches it out and over the pines, and drops it there to die.”

— Jesmyn Ward