To watch your home change in front of you is surprising. But at the same time going someplace like Mississippi makes me appreciate even this.
I always say I write because I have lots of questions not because I have any answers.
I've learned about marrying poetry and prose and making both accessible.
I'm still afraid. I'm still afraid every day.
To me elegy suggests that there is hope and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.
You're a part of me...You're in my heart. Forever and always all right? "?D
This is what kindness does Ms.Albert said. Each little thing we do goes out like a ripple into the world.
Diversity is about all of us and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.
Y'all know how much I love you? "Infinity and back again " I say the way I've said it a million times. And then daddy says to me "go on and add a little bit more to that.
I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.
Maybe this was our last summer as best friends. I feel like something's going to change now and I'm not going to be able to change it back. "?Margaret
That's what makes best friends. It's not whether or not you live on the same block or go to the same school but how you feel about each other in your hearts.
The empty swing set reminds us of this-- that bad won't be bad forever and what is good can sometimes last a long long time.
The Bible is big in the religion treating people as you want to be treated.
But on paper things can live forever. On paper a butterfly never dies.
I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one I move to the other and then I go back.
You have those walls up all around you...Come a day you gonna want to tear them down brick by brick and gonna find that the cement is all hard. What you gonna do then?
I think I'd rather have my heart broke than do the breaking. "?Lena
I couldnt be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because Im pretty optimistic.
There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.
Time comes to us softly slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then long before we are ready it moves on.
I don't know how women stop being friends with other women.
Everything I write I read out loud. It has to sound a certain way. It has to look a certain way on the page.
When I'm writing flawed characters I just think about my own flaws.
When you think of how a child experiences a series of events it feels for so long like she's looking at everything from behind this glass and it's obscured.
I have met women who don't have close women friends and I've always been like "How could that possibly be?
I actually don't think of whiteness and heterosexuality as 'the norm'. Maybe there are people who still do but none of them are close friends of mine.
I do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise
Racism doesn't know color death doesn't know age and pain doesn't know might.
You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.
I love slow readers. And readers who think about what I've written think about how it's written - and copy me!
Don't trust women my mother said to me. Even the ugly ones will take what you thought was yours.
Keep on doing what you're doing.
I believe in one day and someday and this perfect moment called Now.
No matter how big you get it's still okay to cry because everybody's got a right to their own tears.
Sometimes...you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.
Sometimes I don't know that words for things how to write down the feeling of knowing that every dying person leaves something behind.
The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.
I think boys don't always like to read books with female protagonist - I don't even know what to say about this.
My favorite reader is one that revisits books and gets something new out of them each time.
Fifteen. Sixteen was probably something but fifteen - fifteen was a place between here and nowhere.
Seems like every time life starts straightening itself out something's gotta go and happen.
In all your getting get understanding.
I never know when I start writing a story what's going to happen or how it will all get sorted out.
Nothing in the world is like this- a bright white page with pale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencil the soft hush of it moving finally one day into letters.
I think people are sometime reluctant to read outside of their own race. This is heartbreaking.
We live inside our parents' backstory.
One place exists as their interpretation of it. For the people living and thriving inside of it it's another place.
Yes writing is not easy. But can any writer imagine NOT writing?
I'm not afraid of silence. You know I'm not afraid to sit in a room and have the conversation drop into silence. I think that's a very southern thing.
I've learned a lot as a writer about poetry.
That's what writing is. It's moving past your fear.
Even the silence has a story to tell you. Just listen. Listen.
Where I grew up it was all people who were black and Latino people who look like me. Now I live in a neighborhood where very very few people look like me.
What you say is what matters.
People are going to judge you all the time no matter what you do...Don't worry about other people. Worry about you.
Mama says it's okay to be on the quiet side"?if quiet means you're listening watching taking it all in.
Mama was always saying I was a brain snob that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?
Mainly I try not to think about my readers as I write - I just think of my characters and myself - If they're interesting to me my hope is that they'll be interesting to others as well.
There's me in every character I put on the pages.
I pay a lot of attention to whitespace. I pay a lot of attention to the rhythm of words together.
I rewrite my books until they're mostly memorized so that's a lot of rewrites a lot of time spent with my stories.
When I was a kid I got in trouble for lying a lot and I had a teacher say instead of lying write it down because if you write it down it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.