Way Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

11 Way quotes by Jesmyn Ward

Ward’s eleven short pieces on a path reveal her lyrical, empathetic style. They offer a concise, moving glimpse into how she sees direction.

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I always think about Faulkner, and I would argue that there can be a difference between the way that characters express themselves…

Jesmyn Ward

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Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new…

Jesmyn Ward

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My brother died when he was 19, so a part of me indulges and thinks that some part of him that made…

Jesmyn Ward

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I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the…

Jesmyn Ward

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My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent…

Jesmyn Ward

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Through the process of specifically writing this memoir, there was so much reckoning that I had to do. It was very difficult.…

Jesmyn Ward

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When I was writing the memoir, every page was a battle with myself because I knew I had to tell the truth.…

Jesmyn Ward

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When you have a family, even though you might move a lot, you collect all of these things. It's the detritus of…

Jesmyn Ward

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I've also never written about home in this way before. I guess a lot of it is subconscious and I am intuitively…

Jesmyn Ward

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I want each character to be as unique as possible. I want them to reflect something of who they are in the…

Jesmyn Ward

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When I decided to write about my brother and friends, I was attempting to answer the question why. Why did they all…

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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