American - Novelist | -
After I finished my first draft of 'Salvage the Bones,' I felt that I wasn't political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.
Jesmyn Ward
CommunityWritingPoliticalEnough
While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.
WorkActionLanguageFeelI Can
I've heard some writers say that they are obsessed with certain ideas and that they find themselves writing around the same obsession again and again, but telling different stories to get at that same idea. I'm beginning to think that I suffer from this syndrome, too.
BeginningIdeasWritingThinkFind
I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.
LifeBlackThinkingFindStopWrite
Great trouble breeds great art, I think.
GreatArtThinkTroubleGreat Art
It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families' pasts, don't include our non-European ancestors.
FamilyTogetherImpossibleTrees
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
MenMeFreeColorThoughtOthers
My mother helped to integrate the local elementary school in the nineteen-sixties.
MotherSchoolElementary SchoolLocal
I'm from a small town on the bottom edge of Mississippi, very near New Orleans and the Louisiana border. My family has lived there for generations.
FamilySmallBorderSmall TownEdge
I live in the South; there are Confederate flags everywhere.
LiveConfederateEverywhereFlags
It took me a long time to write again because Katrina destroyed the home I loved, and that robbed me of hope.
HomeHopeTimeMeLovedLong
There are moments from childhood that attract heat in our memories, some for their sublime brilliance, some for their malignancy. The first time that I was treated differently because of my race is one such memory.
MemoriesTimeChildhoodMemoryHeat
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Jesmyn Ward quotes