“To give life...is to know what's worth fighting for. And what's love.” — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters. — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I love my community. I love always being able to come back and have a home. — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
If I'm honest about the people that I love, then I need my characters to live through the same things that the… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“Christophe peeled the shrimp slowly and carefully: that was his way around her, and it was the exact opposite of his usual… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
There's so much I love about home, but then there's a lot that I can acknowledge that I dislike about home. And… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“it is the way that all girls who only know one boy move. Centered as if the love that boy feels for… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
People ask me all the time, 'Why did I move home?' As well as I can articulate it, that's why. I moved… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“Because I wanted Michael's mouth on me, because from the first moment I saw him walking across the grass to where I… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I love creating that community and writing about that place, because I think, in some ways, Bois Sauvage is like the DeLisle… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“By the time we'd moved into that rambling, lopsided wooden house, I'd already fallen in love with reading. I think my love… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I celebrate my blackness. I love the artistic vibrancy of the culture I was born to. — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
“In every one of the Greeks' mythology tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman, or a woman chasing a man.… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
I love where I'm from. I love the landscape because it is so beautiful, and I also love the people of my… — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming.” — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee.” — Jesmyn Ward Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
