Laura Isabel

“I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone?”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“This earth is seventy percent water. Hard not to walk into it.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“If we had had jazz, would we have survived differently? If we had known our story was a blues with a refrain running through it, would we have lifted our heads, said to each other, This is memory again and again until the living made sense? Where would we be now if we had known there was a melody to our madness? Because even though Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, and I came together like a jazz improv - half notes tentatively moving toward one another until the ensemble found its footing and the music felt like it had always been playing - we didn't have jazz to know this was who we were. We had the Top 40 music of the 1970s trying to tell our story. It never quite figured us out.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
― Ansel Adams