Jesmyn Ward Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Jesmyn Ward (2013). “Men We Reaped: A Memoir”, p.140, A&C Black

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• I feel like if you aren't honest and if you don't let go and ease up off of the narrator, then the story doesn't take up a life of its own, and the characters can't take up a life of their own. You handicap the story when you try to protect your characters.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Letting Go, Character, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I wanted to be my own heroine.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Heroines, Wanted, My Own

  Jesmyn Ward (2013). “Men We Reaped: A Memoir”, p.86, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Jesmyn Ward (2013). “Men We Reaped: A Memoir”, p.139, A&C Black

  8 Copy quote

• When I was writing the memoir, every page was a battle with myself because I knew I had to tell the truth. That's what the memoir form demands. I also had to figure out how much of the truth do I tell, how do I make the truth as balanced as I possibly can? How do I make these people as complicated and as human and as unique and as multifaceted as I possibly can? For me, that was the way I attempted to counteract some of that criticism.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Writing, Unique, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Jesmyn Ward (2012). “Salvage the Bones”, p.262, A&C Black

  9 Copy quote

• I think that we need to be more aware of how we are all interconnected, and how we actually need to invest in safety nets and in education, and that we need to come to the realization that health care is a human right and try to provide that for people.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Thinking, People, Safety

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• When I decided to write about my brother and friends, I was attempting to answer the question why. Why did they all die like that? Why so many of them? Why so close together? Why were they all so young? Why, especially, in the kinds of places where we are from? Why would they all die back to back to back to back? I feel like I was writing my way towards an answer in the memoir.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Brother, Writing, Together

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  "In ‘Salvage the Bones,’ Jesmyn Ward Tells Personal Story of Hurricane Katrina". Interview with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. August 26, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Things I Love, Said, Clear

  5 Copy quote

• I want each character to be as unique as possible. I want them to reflect something of who they are in the way that they move and in how their bodies work. That was foremost in my head when I was writing Salvage: I wanted every gesture, every little movement, to really carry meaning and communicate meaning to the reader. I was very conscious of that when I was writing.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Moving, Writing, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I think that I'm trying to hopefully change my children's ideas about what is possible, and about what is possible for them.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Thinking, Trying, Hopefully

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• Through the process of specifically writing this memoir, there was so much reckoning that I had to do. It was very difficult. It doesn't erase anything that happened, but I think that it was healthy for me to do it. The teenage self-loathing that I suffered from all of a sudden found itself turned into rapids with my grief after my brother died. I turned it inwards. In the same way that my mom processes her grief and her problems. This project, as a memoir, has helped me funnel it outwards.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Mom, Brother, Teenage

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I came to the realization that I had failed in some respects because I had been more of a benevolent narrator than the world I saw reflected around me, and in the lives of the people in my community, and in my family. There was no benevolent God sparing us pain and loss and grief and struggle. If I was going to continue to write about the place where I am from, and the kind of people who live in my community and who are in my family, I owed it to them to be honest with what our lives are like.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Pain, Grief, Struggle

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• When you have a family, even though you might move a lot, you collect all of these things. It's the detritus of your family and they become the symbols of your family life, and your unit out in the world. In that moment I wanted to allude to the fact that the way my parents' relationship was falling apart was impacting me and my brother, my parents, but also our symbols.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Brother, Moving, Fall

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I hope that if the people who read my work encounter people in the real world who are like the characters that I write about, that maybe that might make them feel empathy for those people. I know it sounds idealistic in a way, but I do hope that my work maybe changes some minds, and that my work makes readers see people as human that maybe before they read my work they might not have seen as humans, and those people include me and my family and my kids, people in my community.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Real, Writing, Character

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Jesmyn Ward (2011). “Salvage the Bones: A Novel”, p.277, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  7 Copy quote

• I feel like so much of what happened in the Delta over the decades since slavery was abolished seems much closer in the Delta, and maybe that's because sharecropping was a fairly recent phenomena. I feel like the past is closer and it bears even more heavily on the present there than it does in the rest of the state.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Past, Slavery, Delta

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Most people just aren't clear-eyed about the rural South. We think that the urban centers are the problem, and the rural areas across the country are idyllic, suffused with good old American values, social values, religious values, moral values. It's what we tell ourselves to keep this political power structure in place, and it's what we see in pop culture, too.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Country, Religious, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think that voodoo as a spiritual tradition has been demonized for so long in popular culture. I wanted to write against that and write a character who practiced that spiritual tradition who was not evil and intent on creating zombies or causing pain through voodoo dolls or whatever.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Spiritual, Pain, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

Page 1 of 2

← Prev

1

2

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin