327 Quotes by Jacqueline Woodson

We were four girls together, amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone.

So why was he feeling like this? Why was he feeling like some promise the universe made had been broken?

Some evenings I don't know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.

How amazing these words are that slowly come to me. How wonderfully on and on they go.Will the words end, I askwhenever I remember to.Nope, my sister says, all of five years oldnow,and promising meinfinity.

When I sit down beside my mother, she shivers. When I touch Ellie's shoulders, she smiles like she knows it's me. Maybe she does. Who could have told me that the wind was some passed-on soul stopping to touch your face, your hands, your hair. Who knew a surprising cool breeze was someone who had gone before you saying, 'You're loved.

Then for a moment like so many times before this I lost the words. Watched them drop . . . No. Dissipate . . . from the air between us. Dissipate. The word has shown up on my SAT prep tests again and again until it landed in this room with us. Between my mother. And me.

Maybe, I am thinking, there is something hidden like this, in all of us. A small gift from the universe waiting to be discovered.

I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.

Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn't one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here.