I feel like I’m a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There’s a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There’s a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
I don’t want my kids to have to walk through a world where they have to constantly explain who they are and who their family is. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
My mom was very strict. And we were very religious. So I knew that I was not allowed to do the wrong thing. And I knew that I had a home I could run to. And I had a mom. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
I think when I was a young person, there was just kind of – there was very little dialogue about it. And there was just kind of one way to be gay, right? You saw very effeminate guys. You saw very butch women. And there was no kind of in-between. And there was no – you know, there wasn’t anything in the media. There wasn’t anything on television. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
I’m fascinated by adult women who don’t have close friends and how that could come to be. I think when you’re a kid, the relationships are so intimate, and you’re so connected to your girls, so what becomes of them? What could possibly happen to have you become an adult woman and no longer have that? Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
The conscious imprinting that happens between, say, 10 and 16 is huge. I think it’s so important for me as a writer to stay open to the memories of that period because they were so formative. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
I think it’s so important that, if I’m writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they’re hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
In all my childhood, I never heard my grandparents say that anything shocked or surprised them. They knew what their country was capable of. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
When I was a child, we never began a meal without prayer. We thanked God for the food, for each other. Jacqueline Woodson Read Quote
