Jacqueline Woodson

“If you come as softlyas the wind within the trees.You may hear what I hear.See what sorrow sees. If you come as lightlyas threading dew,I will take you gladly,nor ask more of you.”

“And sometimes,' Anne said softly, 'there's just plain love, Ellie. no reason for it, no need to explain'Then she leaned back on the couch, crossed her ankle over her knee and grinned. 'Perfect love,' she said. 'And what's that like?''When you find it, lil sis. You'll know.”

“This is what kindness does, Ms.Albert said. Each little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world.”

“Racism doesn't know color, death doesn't know age, and pain doesn't know might.”

“He wondered where that stuff went to, where love went to, how a person could just love somebody one day and boom –- the next day love somebody else.”

“My mamma says I shouldn't go on the other side".... My mama says the same thing. But she never said nothing about sitting on it”

“Someday somebody's going to come along and knock this old fence down.”

“In all your getting, get understanding.”

“No one stops to think, though—that maybe there is a reason for the darkness. Maybe people have to be reminded of it—of its power. At night, we go to sleep against the darkness. And if we wake up before morning, a lot of times we're afraid. We need it all though—the darkness and the light.”

“And when I can't speak it, I write it down. I wish I was different. Wish I was taller, smarter, could talk out loud the way I write things down. I wish I didn't always feel like I was on the outside, looking in like a Peeping Tom.”

“Mama says it's okay to be on the quiet side—if quiet means you're listening, watching, taking it all in.”

“This is how the time moves - an hour here, a day somewhere, and then it's night and then it's morning. A clock ticking on a shelf. A small child running to school, a father coming home. Time moves over us and past us, and the feeling of lips pressed against lips fades into memory. A picture yellows at its edges. A phone rings in an empty room.”

“In our yearbook, there is a picture of me and Miah - sitting in Central Park - Miah has his lips poked out and is about to kiss me on my cheek. And I'm looking straight into the camera laughing. Two and half years have passed, and still, this is how I remember us. This is how I will always remember us. And I know when I look at that picture, when I think back to those few months with Miah, that I did not miss the moment.”

“I think only once in your life do you find someone that you say, "Hey, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my time on this earth with." And if you miss it, or walk away from it, or even maybe, blink - it's gone.”

“I don't know," he said softly. "I look into the future and I don't see anything else. It's like it's this big blank space where I should be.”

“I'm gonna kiss you in each room," he said. "Then it's dinnertime.""How many rooms to this place?" Ellie asked, her eyes wide.Miah shrugged. "I'm not counting.”

“Fifteen. Sixteen was probably something, but fifteen - fifteen was a place between here and nowhere.”

“I would never trust her. Not one hundred percent. Not the way some people can trust their mothers.”

“Thing about white people," Jeremiah's father tells him, "they know what everybody else is, but they don't know they're white" - "Maybe some know it" His father eyed him and smiled "When they walk into a party and everyone's black, they know it. Or when they get caught in Harlem after nightfall, they know it. But otherwise...”

“You're writing, you're coasting, and you're thinking, 'This is the best thing I've ever written, and it's coming so easily, and these characters are so great.' You put it aside for whatever reason, and you open it up a week later and the characters have turned to cardboard and the book has completely fallen apart," she says. "That's the moment of truth for every writer: Can I go on from here and make this book into something? I think it separates the writers from the nonwriters. And I think it's the reason a lot of people have that unfinished manuscript around the house, that albatross.”

“If I loved someone enough, I would go anywhere in the world with them." —Staggerlee”

“I have all this stuff—all these thoughts going on inside me and they all seem so—so dangerous." —Tyler”

“What did it sound like...having someone call your name across a crowded school yard? How did it feel to turn to the sound of your name, to see some smiling face or waving hand and know it was for you and you alone?" —Staggerlee”

“And freedom? Oh, freedom. Well that's just some people talking. Your prison is walking through this world all alone.”

“I wouldn't mind the early autumn if you came home today I'd tell you how much I miss you and know I'd be okay. It's funny how we never know exactly how our life will go It's funny how a dream can fade with the break of day. Time can't erase the memory and time can't bring you home Last Summer was a part of me and now a part is gone.—Margaret”

“Maybe this was our last summer as best friends. I feel like something's going to change now and I'm not going to be able to change it back.—Margaret”

“Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.”

“Mama was always saying I was a brain snob, that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?”

“Sometimes you do have to laugh to keep from crying. And sometimes the world feels all right and good and kind of like it's becoming nice again around you. And you realize it, and realize how happy you are in it, and you just gotta laugh. ”

“Seems like every time life starts straightening itself out, something's gotta go and happen.”

“No matter how big you get, it's still okay to cry because everybody's got a right to their own tears.”

“Some days I just think the whole world and life and everything is stupid. And that's 'cause I be missing you.”

“It seemed like someone was always leaving someone, like that's the way the world worked—people were born and people died, people left and people came. It was like the world was saying you can't have everything you want at the same time.”

“But it's what the world does to people. It makes some of us feel ugly and it makes some of us look like criminals, like angry fools.”

“Life...moves us through all the time changes. All kinds of changes. And we're made so that we roll and move with it. Sometimes somebody gets stuck in the present and the rolling stops—but the changing doesn't.”

“Sometimes...you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.”

“Sometimes...it seems as though not a moment has moved, but then you look up and you're already old or you already have a household of kids or you look down and see your feet are miles and miles away from the rest of you—and you realize you've grown up.”

“That's what makes best friends. It's not whether or not you live on the same block or go to the same school, but how you feel about each other in your hearts.”

“I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much...so, so much.”

“People are going to judge you all the time no matter what you do...Don't worry about other people. Worry about you.”

“You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.”

“You have those walls up all around you...Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?”

“You're a part of me...You're in my heart. Forever and always, all right? —D”

“Lately, I'd been feeling like I was standing outside watching everything and everybody. Wishing I could take the part of me that was over there and the part of me that was over here and push them together—make myself into one whole person like everybody else.”

“I feel like the world stopped. And I got off...and then it started spinning again, but too fast for me to hop back on. I feel like I'm still trying to get a...to get some kind of foothold on living”

“Everything and everyone seemed like it was part of a long-ago time—when I was young and free and living.”

“Kids are something. All they can see is the beauty in a moment.”

“Feels like I've known him since before he got to the world—longer than he knew himself, truthfully. Seems like we'd been friends really...Somewhere before life on earth...”

“I think I'd rather have my heart broke than do the breaking. —Lena”