Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

I write to tell my grandchildren where they come from, and what their grandparents were up to, and I hope they will in their own way continue. I invite anyone else to listen in.

We should all know our family's story, all the more so if nobody tells it to us directly and we have to find it out for ourselves.

Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.

The same way one tells a recipe, one tells a family history. Each one of us has our past locked inside.

I come from a family of storytellers.

History is very much bound up in family experience.

My roots are documentaries.

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

You want to try to find your heritage.

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

We live in a society that celebrates familial connection above any other kind of relationship. We are shown photos of our great-grandparents and encouraged to marvel over facial similarities. We are told to take pride in our bloodlines, celebrate our ancestry.

People will not look forward to posterity who are not anxious to look backward to their ancestry

As you get older, you get more... genealogical.

I'd love to meet my ancestors. I'd love to be able to speak to them.

As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.

Blue Ivy can say she knows who her great-great-great-great-grandfather is. How many people can say that?

I feel I have a responsibility to carry out the immigrant story, since it's one that I hold very dear to my heart, since my story is similar in a lot of ways.

I never, by any regard, ever denied any part of my family roots.

My mother was from West Bromwich; my grandfather was Pakistani. I had an aunt who started trying to trace the family tree and stopped when she saw what turned up.

I wanted to put all my family stories down for my girls, and I remember everything so vividly. I just wanted to put everything down while I still can remember it all.

I really appreciate the British part of my family.

Rosecrans is a family name - it used to be a last name in our family.

My mom's side of the family is from Arkansas!

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

I looked up my family tree and found out I was the sap.