To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you’ve moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it. – Jacqueline Woodson
I never know, when I start writing a story, what’s going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out. – Jacqueline Woodson
I realized if I didn’t start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn’t be around to help me look back and remember. – Jacqueline Woodson
You can’t have too many books featuring people of color, just like you can’t have too many books featuring white people. – Jacqueline Woodson
The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It’s so hard to show something that’s bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart. – Jacqueline Woodson
I couldn’t be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I’m pretty optimistic. – Jacqueline Woodson
Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together. – Jacqueline Woodson
The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me – to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking. – Jacqueline Woodson
I’m usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back. – Jacqueline Woodson
When I’m feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it’s going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn’t historically been represented in literature. – Jacqueline Woodson
