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Everything I write, I read out loud. It has to sound a certain way. It has to look a certain way on the page.

Jacqueline Woodson

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Jacqueline Woodson
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: February 12
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Columbus
Ohio
Look
Everything
Page
Looks
Loud
Writing
Pages
Way
Sound
Read
Write
Certain

More quotes by Jacqueline Woodson

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I think it's important to remember that writing is a gift and our stories are gifts to ourselves and to the world and sometimes giving isn't always the easiest thing to do but it comes back.
Jacqueline Woodson
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Fifteen. Sixteen was probably something, but fifteen - fifteen was a place between here and nowhere.
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If I loved someone enough, I would go anywhere in the world with them. —Staggerlee
Jacqueline Woodson
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I couldnt be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because Im pretty optimistic.
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I remember my mother would get upset with me 'cause she said I walked like my dad. But I think it was more like, there's something about you that's not quite ladylike and femme. And then when I got older - once I came out, my mom and grandma were horrified and just kind of like, where did we go wrong?
Jacqueline Woodson
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Lately, I'd been feeling like I was standing outside watching everything and everybody. Wishing I could take the part of me that was over there and the part of me that was over here and push them together—make myself into one whole person like everybody else.
Jacqueline Woodson
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I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called Now.
Jacqueline Woodson
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I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.
Jacqueline Woodson
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I think people are sometime reluctant to read outside of their own race. This is heartbreaking.
Jacqueline Woodson
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I have met women who don't have close women friends, and I've always been like, How could that possibly be?
Jacqueline Woodson
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I actually don't think of whiteness and heterosexuality as 'the norm'. Maybe there are people who still do but none of them are close friends of mine.
Jacqueline Woodson
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There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.
Jacqueline Woodson
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That's what makes best friends. It's not whether or not you live on the same block or go to the same school, but how you feel about each other in your hearts.
Jacqueline Woodson
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When I'm writing flawed characters, I just think about my own flaws.
Jacqueline Woodson
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Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.
Jacqueline Woodson
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The empty swing set reminds us of this-- that bad won't be bad forever, and what is good can sometimes last a long, long time.
Jacqueline Woodson
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I think I had gotten messages really young that poetry wasn't for me, that it was for, basically, some dead white men. My experience and my intellect was on the outside of understanding that. I think that's what's so destructive.
Jacqueline Woodson
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There's me in every character I put on the pages.
Jacqueline Woodson
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You have those walls up all around you...Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?
Jacqueline Woodson
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I think people need to remember that a book isn't done after a few rewrites and a publisher isn't going to buy an 'undone' book so the hard part is making it a book that at least ten other people want to pay for to read.
Jacqueline Woodson