277 Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

From the time your children begin walking, they are moving away from you. This is as it should be, even when you can’t protect them from harm with anything but the inadequate outerwear of your love.

The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow up our playground.

But another part of me wants to shake Jojo and Michaela awake, to lean down and yell so they startle and sit up so I don’t have to see the way they turn to each other like plants following the sun across the sky. They are each other’s light.

She took what my grandfather left her with, and she built it into something more, and she survived.

I burn, and I hope.

But it was impossible to not hear the animals, because I looked at them and understood, instantly, and it was like looking at a sentence and understanding the words, all of it coming to me at once.

The lightning cracked again, this time like it was right on top of us, feet away from arcing through the house, and her skin was white as stone and her hair waving, and I thought about the Medusa I’d seen in an old movie when I was younger, monstrous and green-scaled, and I thought: That’s not it at all. She was beautiful as Mama. That’s how she froze those men, with the shock of seeing something so perfect and fierce in the world.

We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were still alive even as we did everything to die.

Walking is, after all, interrupted falling. We see, we listen, we speak, and we trust that each step we take won’t be our last, but will lead us into a richer understanding of the self and the world.