Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward

Black people in the US are told all the time, from all aspects, that they’re nothing, that they’re less than. And of course that bears fruit, but no one wants to shoulder part of the blame. A lot of people here can’t see around their own family’s history. They don’t want to see that where they come from and the people they surround themselves with might have played a role in all this. This is all part of our national myth about the individual. We think that a lack of success comes from the individual not working hard enough. A lot of people in this country really believe that.

Believe

Country

Thinking

By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.

Numbers

Racism

Records

Grief doesn’t fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

Grief

Hurt

Suffering

I came to the realization that I had failed in some respects because I had been more of a benevolent narrator than the world I saw reflected around me, and in the lives of the people in my community, and in my family. There was no benevolent God sparing us pain and loss and grief and struggle. If I was going to continue to write about the place where I am from, and the kind of people who live in my community and who are in my family, I owed it to them to be honest with what our lives are like.

Grief

Pain

Struggle

I consider myself a progressive, so my answer would be that we need to be progressive. For some reason the people in power in Mississippi still seem to be invested in these very American myths.”The individual is alone.” “We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.” “We create success for ourselves, and if we work hard enough then we will succeed and have success beyond our wildest dreams.” I think that we need to do away with that kind of thinking and be more aware of history and how the history of this place bears in the present and how it affects people.

Dream

Hard Work

Thinking

I feel like if you aren’t honest and if you don’t let go and ease up off of the narrator, then the story doesn’t take up a life of its own, and the characters can’t take up a life of their own. You handicap the story when you try to protect your characters.

Character

Letting Go

Trying

I feel like so much of what happened in the Delta over the decades since slavery was abolished seems much closer in the Delta, and maybe that’s because sharecropping was a fairly recent phenomena. I feel like the past is closer and it bears even more heavily on the present there than it does in the rest of the state.

Delta

Past

Slavery

I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren’t.

Class

People

Writing

I felt like if I didn’t write about what happened to the young men here in the South of America, the same things would keep occurring. Here in the South, young black men just keep dying – young black women, too. I couldn’t live with myself if I hadn’t been as honest as possible about that.

Black

Men

Writing

I have never written a novel that volleys back and forth between a couple of different first person perspectives. It’s definitely a challenge because I had to think about who knows what, when do they know it, when are they sharing what they know or what they think they know, how the reader’s perspective affects things. Telling the story in that way is challenging. It does require a lot of revision.

Couple

Perspective

Thinking

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Abuse

Artist

Baby

Balls

Believe

Black

Bones

Book

Brother

Character

Children

Class

Clear

Country

Couple

Cutting

Delta

Dream

Fall

Father

Fiction

Fighting

Fire

Firsts

Flirting

Girl

Grief

Growing Up

Hands

Hard Work

Hate

Heroines

Home

Hopefully

Hurt

Imagine

Imagine That

Laughter

Letting Go

Mean

Men

Michigan

Millionaire

Mom

Mother

Moving

My Own

Nice

Nudge

Numbers

The Future Blueprint

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The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

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Quotes by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward

By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.

Grief doesn’t fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

I feel like if you aren’t honest and if you don’t let go and ease up off of the narrator, then the story doesn’t take up a life of its own, and the characters can’t take up a life of their own. You handicap the story when you try to protect your characters.

I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren’t.

I felt like if I didn’t write about what happened to the young men here in the South of America, the same things would keep occurring. Here in the South, young black men just keep dying – young black women, too. I couldn’t live with myself if I hadn’t been as honest as possible about that.

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

The Relationship Therapist

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