Jesmyn Ward Quotes

16 quotes in 382 categories

• Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are…
• Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space…
• By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our…
• There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private
• I wanted to be my own heroine.
• She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as…
• I read the last Harry Potter, and I cried for at least the last 70 pages. Awful! I was curled into a ball and I…
• I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in…
• That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.
• While I've said that there are plenty of things I dislike about the South, I can be clear that there are things I love about…
• I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes…
• 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…
• My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent more time with…
• My father owned pit bulls when I was young. He sometimes fought them. My brother and a lot of the men in my community owned…
• When I look back on my reading habits when I was really young, I was really drawn to stories about strong girls who in some…
• I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

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