Jesmyn Ward famous quotes

04-17-2025

I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Girl #Running #Strong
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 pit bulls as well: sometimes they fought them for honor, never for money.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Brother #Father #Men
My mom worked as a housekeeper, and I saw her relationship with her employers - how on the one hand she spent more time with these women than with a lot of her friends, and how in certain ways they were friends. But then they weren't.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Mom #Hands #Way
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 I workshopped the entire thing.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Michigan #Firsts #Bones
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 against the trend in fiction.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Reading #Trying #Fiction
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 the South.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Said #Clear #Plenty
That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Writing #People #Fiction
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 my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren't.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Writing #Class #People
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 just kept sobbing. It was embarrassing. I was loud, and I just kept wiping tears away so I could see the page.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Tears #Balls #Potters
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 blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Mother #Baby #Cutting
I wanted to be my own heroine.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Heroines #Wanted
There is laughter, shrill calls. Everyone is flirting, saying in nudges and jokes and blushing what they would do in private
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Laughter #Flirting #Nudge
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 lives are worth: nothing.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Numbers #Racism #Records
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 above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Children #Fire #Wind
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 never free from grief.
-- Jesmyn Ward

#Hurt #Grief #Suffering

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