277 Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee.

Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and I wake up and it ain’t changed none. It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of ‘Salvage the Bones’ at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

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.

You my baby.” She breathes heavy, and the grate cracks and sinks to rusted stillness. “Like I drew the veil back so you could walk in this life, you’ll help me draw it back so I can walk in the next.

I didn’t want them to look at me after saying something about Black people, didn’t want to have to avert my eyes so they didn’t see me studying them, studying the entitlement they wore like another piece of clothing.

No, she love you. She don’t know how to show it. And her love for herself and her love for Michael – well, it gets in the way. It confuse her.

I knew that I lived in a place where hope and a sense of possibility were as ephemeral as morning fog, but I did not see the despair at the heart of our drug use.

I don’t want to be empty breath. Bitter at the marrow of my bones. I don’t want that, Leonie.