Top 100 Jesmyn Ward Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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. Where.”

— Jesmyn Ward

52. “It’s cold. This spring is stubborn; most days, it won’t make way for warmth. The chill stays like water in a bad-draining tub.”

— Jesmyn Ward

53. “Walking is, after all, interrupted falling. We see, we listen, we speak, and we trust that each step we take won’t be our last, but will lead us into a richer understanding of the self and the world.”

— Jesmyn Ward

54. “But this grief, for all its awful weight, insists that he matters.”

— Jesmyn Ward

55. “What my mother left unsaid: I’ll keep working, supporting us all, while you try to live your dream. Her sacrifice remained unacknowledged.”

— Jesmyn Ward

56. “Replace ropes with bullets. Hound dogs with German shepherds. A gray uniform with a bulletproof vest. Nothing is new.”

— Jesmyn Ward

57. “If the scrapes were on the front of our knees, she would put our dirty feet in the middle of her chest to clean the wounds, and we could feel her heart beating, strong as the thud of the ground when we walked, through our soles.”

— Jesmyn Ward

58. “Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.”

— Jesmyn Ward

59. “And then she would put her hand over the bird’s face like she was hiding it from seeing something, and then she would grab and twist. Break the neck. Slice the head off on the stump.”

— Jesmyn Ward

60. “It’s like the cuffs cut all the way down to the bone. ‘It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.’ Like my marrow could carry a bruise.”

— Jesmyn Ward

61. “I wanted to be my own heroine.”

— Jesmyn Ward

62. “Because I wanted Michael’s mouth on me, because from the first moment I saw him walking across the grass to where I sat in the shadow of the school sign, he saw me. Saw past skin the color of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the color of plums, and saw me. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.”

— Jesmyn Ward

63. “But I resented her when I was young, resented her for the lessons and the misplaced hope. And later, for still believing in good in a world that cursed her with cancer, that twisted her limp as an old dry rag and left her to disintegrate.”

— Jesmyn Ward

64. “Ain’t no good in using anger just to lash. You pray for it to blow up a storm that’s going to flush out the truth.”

— Jesmyn Ward

65. “In the end, I understand his desire, the self’s desire to silence the self, and thus the world.”

— Jesmyn Ward

66. “I wonder if they dream the same dreams. I wonder if they dream of home: of jungle-tangled trees, bearing the weight of the sky. Of streams leading to rivers leading to the sea.”

— Jesmyn Ward

67. “I don’t want to be empty breath. Bitter at the marrow of my bones. I don’t want that, Leonie.”

— Jesmyn Ward

68. “I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of ‘Salvage the Bones’ at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.”

— Jesmyn Ward

69. “Some scientists for BP said this didn’t have nothing to do with the oil, that sometimes this is what happens to animals: they die for unexpected reasons. Sometimes a lot of them. Sometimes all at once... And when that scientist said that, I thought about humans. Because humans is animals.”

— Jesmyn Ward

70. “Vines catch my arms, my head; we tear through until we break out into the clearing before the fence, the field, the barn, the house, and I drop to my knees, and Randall leans back as if he would fall, both of us breathing hard, looking wet and newly born.”

— Jesmyn Ward

71. “How the privilege of my education, my eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother’s hands. How unfair it all seemed.”

— Jesmyn Ward

72. “The burden of regret weighs heavily. It is relentless.”

— Jesmyn Ward

73. “I stand until there is no sun. I stand until I smell pine through the salt and sulfur. I stand until the moon rises and their mouths close and they are a murder of silver crows. I stand until the forest is a black-knuckled multitude.”

— Jesmyn Ward

74. “Joshua looked through the screen and it was as if he saw me clearly with my soapy hands, my wrinkled fingers, my jaw grinding with frustration and self-abasement, and he hated me. 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

75. “There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private.”

— Jesmyn Ward

76. “They never touched each other in anger, but the small things in that house suffered.”

— Jesmyn Ward

77. “My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers – how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a lot of her friends, and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren’t.”

— Jesmyn Ward

78. “I read the last Harry Potter, and I cried for at least the last 70 pages. Awful! I was curled into a ball and I just kept sobbing. It was embarrassing. I was loud, and I just kept wiping tears away so I could see the page.”

— Jesmyn Ward

79. “From the time your children begin walking, they are moving away from you. This is as it should be, even when you can’t protect them from harm with anything but the inadequate outerwear of your love.”

— Jesmyn Ward

80. “The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming.”

— Jesmyn Ward

81. “I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn’t dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.”

— Jesmyn Ward

82. “Why figure out what will motivate this kid to learn if, statistically, he’s just another young Black male destined to drop out anyway? He was never referred to a counselor, never tested for a learning disorder, never given some sort of individual attention that might better equip him to navigate junior high school and high school.”

— Jesmyn Ward

83. “I swallow. I breathe. All delicious and damned.”

— Jesmyn Ward

84. “That’s why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.”

— Jesmyn Ward

85. “Pop’s told me some parts of Richie’s story over and over again. I’ve heard the beginning at least too many times to count. There are parts in the middle, about the outlaw hero Kinnie Wagner and the evil Hogjaw, that I’ve only heard twice. I ain’t never heard the end.”

— Jesmyn Ward

86. “Did every step feel like the running leap a bird takes before flight?”

— Jesmyn Ward

87. “The music, all violins and cellos, swells in the room, then recedes, like the water out in the Gulf before a big storm.”

— Jesmyn Ward

88. “A little more than half a century after Brown, the election of Obama gave hope to the country and the world that a new racial climate had emerged in America, or that it would. But such audacious hopes would be short-lived. A rash of voter-suppression legislation, a series of unfathomable Supreme Court decisions, the rise of stand-your-ground laws, and continuing police brutality make clear that Obama’s election and reelection have unleashed yet another wave of fear and anger. It.”

— Jesmyn Ward

89. “We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped. – Harriet Tubman Young.”

— Jesmyn Ward

90. “My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.”

— Jesmyn Ward

91. “Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee.”

— Jesmyn Ward

92. “The spectacle of the shooting suggest an event out of time, as if the killing of black people with white-supremacist justification interrupts anything other than regular television programming. But Dylan Storm Roof did not create himself from nothing. He as grown up with the rhetoric and orientation of racism.”

— Jesmyn Ward

93. “The lightning cracked again, this time like it was right on top of us, feet away from arcing through the house, and her skin was white as stone and her hair waving, and I thought about the Medusa I’d seen in an old movie when I was younger, monstrous and green-scaled, and I thought: That’s not it at all. She was beautiful as Mama. That’s how she froze those men, with the shock of seeing something so perfect and fierce in the world.”

— Jesmyn Ward

94. “We’re tired. We’re tired of having to figure out how to talk to our kids and teach them that America sees them as less, and that she just might kill them. This is the conversation we want to avoid. We’re tired of feeling futile in the face of this ever-present danger, this omnipotent history, predicated as this country is, founded as this country was, on our subjugation.”

— Jesmyn Ward

95. “Death, a great mouth set to swallow.”

— Jesmyn Ward

96. “They’ve talked about this: I can tell by the way Maggie said his name, the way a woman says the name of a man that she has long lived with, long loved.”

— Jesmyn Ward

97. “When I’d transferred to the Episcopalian school in sixth grade, I’d found irresistible the idea of a God who loved me unfailingly, scars and all. Here was a man who would never leave, I thought. Someone whom I would never disappoint. Later, I would fall away from the church when the rigidity of the doctrine and hypocrisy of some of the most devout Christian students I went to school with became apparent to me. In the end, I realized sometimes some people were forsaken.”

— Jesmyn Ward

98. “I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren’t.”

— Jesmyn Ward

99. “When people ask me about my hometown, I tell them it was called after a wolf before it was partially tamed and settled.”

— Jesmyn Ward

100. “I’m still ashamed that I did not step out of that dense grass, that I did not climb those steps and grab his hand and lead him down them as an elder sister should, that I did not say: Here I am, brother. I’m here.”

— Jesmyn Ward