History Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

10 History quotes by Jesmyn Ward

Ward’s voice brings a raw, human edge to the annals of time. In this short collection you’ll feel her blend of personal memory and broader social currents, offering a poignant snapshot of how history lives inside everyday lives.

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History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of…

Jesmyn Ward

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I think that often in the United States we're very blind to the ways that history lives in the present.

Jesmyn Ward

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By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this…

Jesmyn Ward

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“We seem to be in a continuing feedback loop of repeating a past that our country has yet to address. Our history…

Jesmyn Ward

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“Men’s bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear…

Jesmyn Ward

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“We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing. We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we…

Jesmyn Ward

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I think that we're just too invested in that myth that we are not connected, and are all potential millionaires if only…

Jesmyn Ward

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“Demond’s family history wasn’t so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again,…

Jesmyn Ward

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I consider myself a progressive, so my answer would be that we need to be progressive. For some reason the people in…

Jesmyn Ward

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“But race in the United States is not a tidy matter. Only three of the submitted pieces explicitly referenced the future. Most…

Jesmyn Ward

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I wanted to write about voodoo tradition that I feel has been very important to survival of black people here: people of the African…

Jesmyn Ward

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I think that voodoo as a spiritual tradition has been demonized for so long in popular culture. I wanted to write against that and…

Jesmyn Ward

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There's so much I love about home, but then there's a lot that I can acknowledge that I dislike about home. And acknowledging that…

Jesmyn Ward

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“The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming.”

Jesmyn Ward

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The first writer that I think of immediately that I studied with at Michigan is Peter Ho Davies. He was really important to me,…

Jesmyn Ward

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I feel like so much of what happened in the Delta over the decades since slavery was abolished seems much closer in the Delta,…

Jesmyn Ward

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“Vines catch my arms, my head; we tear through until we break out into the clearing before the fence, the field, the barn, the…

Jesmyn Ward

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

Jesmyn Ward

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People give the South a bad rap. It's often stereotyped as backwards and close-minded and dogmatic, and all of those things have been true.…

Jesmyn Ward

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By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events…

Jesmyn Ward

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When I was a teenager, I was the only black girl at a small, private Episcopal school, where my tuition was paid by the…

Jesmyn Ward

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She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies,…

Jesmyn Ward

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I hope people who read my books feel empathy for us and really see us as complicated people.

Jesmyn Ward

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When I was writing my first novel, 'Where the Line Bleeds,' which had young black men as its main characters, I was very invested…

Jesmyn Ward

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“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…

Jesmyn Ward

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