I deeply believe in many Christian values: love people; do the right thing; know that there’s good in everyone, that God’s looking out for all of us. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children – sitting on my grandparents’ back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don’t pay attention or bear witness to it. It’s part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It’s important to put that on the page. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
We, as adults, are the gatekeepers, and we have to check our own fears at the door because we want our children to be smarter than we are. We want them to be more fully human than we are. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
My mom was a big fan of Al Green… James Brown we weren’t allowed to listen to, so of course I knew James Brown. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn’t get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
In the family, writing wasn’t anything anyone understood – being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn’t have those mirrors. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
Another Brooklyn’ came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn’t resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
