Jesmyn Ward > Quotes

“Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“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, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing. We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history said, mumbling along, brainwashed: I am nothing. We drank too much, smoked too much, were abusive to ourselves, to each other. We were bewildered. There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“it is the way that all girls who only know one boy move. Centered as if the love that boy feels for them anchors them deep as a tree's roots, holds them still as the oaks, which don't uproot in hurricane wind. Love as certainty.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“I hope I fed you enough. While I'm here. So you carry it with you. Like a camel.' I can hear the smile in her voice, faint. A baring of teeth. 'Maybe that ain't a good way of putting it. Like a well, Jojo. Pull that water up when you need it.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“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, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“After I left New York, I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are never free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants [...] since Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that too. Can eat a person until there’s nothing but bone and skin and a thin layer of blood left. How it can eat your insides and swell you in wrong ways.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“I washed my hands every day, Jojo. But that damn blood ain't never come out. Hold my hands up to my face, I can smell it under my skin. Smelled it when the warden and sergeant cam up on us, the dogs yipping and licking blood from they muzzles. They'd torn his throat out, hamstringed him. Smelled it when the warden told me I'd done good. Smelled it the day they let me out on account I'd led the dog that caught and killed Richie. Smelled it when I finally found his mama after weeks of searching, just so I could tell her Richie was dead and she could look at me with a stone face and shut the door on me. Smelled it when I made it home in the middle of the night, smelled it over the sour smell of the bayou and the salt smell of the sea, smelled it years later when I climbed into bed with Philomene, put my nose in your grandmother's neck, and breathed her in like the scent of her could wash the other away. But it didn't. When Given died, I thought I'd drown in it. Drove me blind, made me so crazy I couldn't speak. Didn't nothing come close to easing it until you came along.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. 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, Salvage the Bones

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time. Where”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were still alive even as we did everything to die.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“And I get up because it is the only thing I can do.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“Can't nothing bother me when I got my hands in the dirt, he said. Like I'm talking to God with my fingers.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Ain't no good in using anger just to lash. You pray for it to blow up a storm that's going to flush out the truth.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“There's too much blank sky where a tree once stood.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“In every one of the Greeks' mythology tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman, or a woman chasing a man. There is never a meeting in the middle.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“What's done in the dark always comes to the light.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“But this grief, for all its awful weight, insists that he matters.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“And it was easier to let him keep on touching me than ask him to stop, easier to let him inside than to push him away, easier than hearing him ask me, "Why not?" It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“I will not let him see until none of us have any choices about what can be seen, what can be avoided, what is blind, and what will turn us to stone.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black. Eleven”
― Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

“But I am not that eloquent, so I shut my mouth and smile.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

“And then I get up because it is the only thing I can do. I step out of the ditch and brush the ants off because it is the only thing I can do. I follow Randall around the house because it is the only thing I can do; if this is strength, if this is weakness, this is what I do. I hiccup, but tears still run down my face. After Mama died, Daddy said, What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain’t going to change anything. We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing that we could do. I swallow and squint through the tears, and I run.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn't dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

“It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing