Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

I've seen firsthand how books can change people's lives. It happened to me.

Reading equals hope times change.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

If there's a 13- or 14-year old kid who is yearning for something beyond the social forces in his own world, in his own neighborhood, the library is the only place where he can go to find that. It was exciting and thrilling to me all the time I worked in the library. It's such a force for social good and it can do so much.

Reading has been the fuel of my motivation: it has changed the direction in which I have traveled, and it has enhanced my creative imagination more than any other activity I have ever pursued.

Life has changed enormously, and I hope - I hope more people read good things.

I think reading is important for a variety of things. I mean, first of all, it's a way to get information and find out what's going on in the world. But also, it helps your imagination.

Reading is an act of civilization; it's one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.

When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.

Books are challenging and inspirational to me.

Through literacy you can begin to see the universe. Through music you can reach anybody. Between the two there is you, unstoppable.

I feel very privileged to have reached so many kids because a life without stories, without the power of books, would be a very grey world, it's good to add colour.

A love of books has opened so many doors for me. Stories have inspired me and taught me to aspire.

It's neither my job nor within my capabilities to save people. But a book sure can try.

Read everything! I believe that reading made me a writer.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

I think that we all absolutely have curiosity. It brings about knowledge. It's energizing. It's spiritually empowering. It makes us more interesting as people.

To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.

Though he was not a reader himself, my father understood that reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.

I encourage a lot of young women to read. I tell them that it will change their lives.

I think reading is one of the greatest forms of magic available to us on the planet. Reading is so important.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Reading was very important to me as a kid. It was very inspirational to me. I went to a school where that wasn't encouraged so much, but my parents encouraged that, and it has made me part of who I am.

When I got large enough to go to work, while employed I was reflecting on many things that would present themselves to my imagination; and whenever an opportunity occurred of looking at a book, when the school-children were getting their lessons, I would find many things that the fertility of my own imagination had depicted to me before.