“Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
“I think only once in your life do you find someone that you say, "Hey, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my time on this earth with." And if you miss it, or walk away from it, or even maybe, blink - it's gone.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
“He wondered where that stuff went to, where love went to, how a person could just love somebody one day and boom –- the next day love somebody else.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
“Fifteen. Sixteen was probably something, but fifteen - fifteen was a place between here and nowhere.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
“I'm gonna kiss you in each room," he said. "Then it's dinnertime."
"How many rooms to this place?" Ellie asked, her eyes wide.
Miah shrugged. "I'm not counting.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
“I don't know," he said softly. "I look into the future and I don't see anything else. It's like it's this big blank space where I should be.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
“I would never trust her. Not one hundred percent. Not the way some people can trust their mothers.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
“In our yearbook, there is a picture of me and Miah - sitting in Central Park - Miah has his lips poked out and is about to kiss me on my cheek. And I'm looking straight into the camera laughing. Two and half years have passed, and still, this is how I remember us. This is how I will always remember us. And I know when I look at that picture, when I think back to those few months with Miah, that I did not miss the moment.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
“This is how the time moves - an hour here, a day somewhere, and then it's night and then it's morning. A clock ticking on a shelf. A small child running to school, a father coming home.
Time moves over us and past us, and the feeling of lips pressed against lips fades into memory. A picture yellows at its edges. A phone rings in an empty room.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
“If you come as softly
as the wind within the trees.
You may hear what I hear.
See what sorrow sees.
If you come as lightly
as threading dew,
I will take you gladly,
nor ask more of you.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
“Thing about white people," Jeremiah's father tells him, "they know what everybody else is, but they don't know they're white" - "Maybe some know it" His father eyed him and smiled "When they walk into a party and everyone's black, they know it. Or when they get caught in Harlem after nightfall, they know it. But otherwise...”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
“And sometimes,' Anne said softly, 'there's just plain love, Ellie. no reason for it, no need to explain'
Then she leaned back on the couch, crossed her ankle over her knee and grinned. 'Perfect love,' she said.
'And what's that like?'
'When you find it, lil sis. You'll know.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
“Chapter 1 JEREMIAH WAS BLACK. HE COULD FEEL IT. THE WAY THE sun pressed down hard and hot on his skin in the summer. Sometimes it felt like he sweated black beads of oil. He felt warm inside his skin, protected. And in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—where everyone seemed to be some shade of black-he felt good walking through the neighborhood. But one step outside. Just one step and somehow the weight of his skin seemed to change. It got heavier. Light-skinned”
― Jacqueline Woodson, quote from If You Come Softly
Jacqueline Woodson
Born place: in Columbus, Ohio, The United States
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“Being with Aliyana like this…her accepting soul only seeing me for me and not my past, a fucking unwarranted blind faith…she filled me with hope.”
― Tillie Cole, quote from Sweet Hope
“There was something about being sent to one’s death and surviving a baptism of fire upon one’s return that pushed most squabblings into the deepest recesses of one’s mind.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Dust
“There's nothing wrong with keeping quiet, after all, hadn't women traditionally been expected to be demure and restrained?”
― Han Kang, quote from The Vegetarian
“Talent is a piece of God's shadow. And under that shadow, human stories intersect.”
― Mitch Albom, quote from The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto
“Tokyo was an origami city folded over and over until something was made of virtually nothing.”
― Christopher Barzak, quote from The Love We Share Without Knowing
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The 4-Hour WorkweekBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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