277 Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

Lot of folks was in there for stealing food because everybody was poor and starving, and even though White people couldn’t get your work for free, they did everything they could to avoid hiring you and paying you for it.

Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.

We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped. – Harriet Tubman Young.

There’s things that move a man. Like currents of water inside. Things he can’t help. Older I got, the more I found it true. What’s in Stag is like water so black and deep you can’t see the bottom.

Joshua looked through the screen and it was as if he saw me clearly with my soapy hands, my wrinkled fingers, my jaw grinding with frustration and self-abasement, and he hated me. Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was.

I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don’t think I’m very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.

This baby got plenty of daddies. – Esch.

There’s so many,′ Richie says. His voice is molasses slow. ‘So many of us,’ he says. ‘Hitting. The wrong keys. Wandering against. The song.

I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn’t dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.