327 Quotes by Jacqueline Woodson

Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow. – Langston Hughes.

Guess that’s where the tears came from, knowing that there’s so much in this great big world that you don’t have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you’ll have one less heartbreak in your life.

This earth is seventy percent water. Hard not to walk into it.

We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico.

Maybe this was love – wanting someone with all the senses.

My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.

No matter how big you get, it’s still okay to cry because everybody’s got a right to their own tears.

That’s why I don’t buy it when people say children don’t know. That they’re too young to understand. If they can walk and talk, they can understand. You look at how much growing a baby does in the first few years of its life – crawling, walking, talking, laughing. The brain just changing and changing. You can’t tell me all of it’s not becoming a part of their blood. Their memory.

It seemed like someone was always leaving someone, like that’s the way the world worked – people were born and people died, people left and people came. It was like the world was saying you can’t have everything you want at the same time.