Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

I think sometimes feeling that you've been marginalized opens you up to the realization that, in their own lives, almost everyone experiences marginalization, a kind of foreigner sense.

Assimilation is the way you excuse yourself. It absolutely never worked at all. You may not think you are noticeable. But they know who you are. They know you're a degenerate, and they've never forgotten that.

Sexism and racism and homophobia and classism are so naturalized. All these stereotypes make people think it's just normal that straight white men are getting all the breaks.

Usually, you know, you're at a table and you're the only woman, you've got this idea, you finally speak up - I mean, I've been in some settings where every head turns toward me and then they all turn away as if I've never spoken. Which I think happens when whatever I said was so out of the blue, or so awkward, that they just didn't know how to respond.

Humorists always sit at the children's table.

But there was no room at the inn"; the inn is the gathering place of public opinion; so often public opinion locks its doors to the King.

I think Hollywood is incredibly segregated. I've never seen any place like it.

What haven't I been called? Every antigay, misogynist, anti-Semitic, anti-liberal smear you can think of. I don't think I can transform those smears; I can't even repeat them! But I proudly embrace the identities beneath them.

A rising tide raises all boats, but you need a boat to rise with the tide. What does he who does not have a boat do?

When these resources are degraded or polluted, then there are fewer of them for the rest of us, and then we start competing for them and eventually as we compete, there are those of us, who have the capacity, who have the ability to be the controllers, to decide who accesses them, how much they access, and eventually there is a conflict. Those who feel marginalized, those who feel excluded, eventually react in an effort to get their own justice, and we have conflict.

When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished.

I have said it many times: the policy of exclusion and the policy of marginalization must end in Iraq.

Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.

I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.

I think humans are driven by othering people, by defining themselves by who they are not and who is different from them. Human beings are in love with othering.

At the heart of the celebration, there are the poor. If [they] are excluded, it is not longer a celebration. [...] A celebration must always be a festival of the poor.

What the white man in America needs to realize is there's a new thinking among black people today which makes them not willing to sit around and wait for five years to get this problem solved, much less a hundred years.

I was never asked to join the Editorial Cartoonists Of America. No fraternity would have me in college, either. I think they know something.

I've always been an outsider. I am an outsider in Garbage. I'm the odd one out by default.

I feel like I am not an American in the eyes of my government because of their religious beliefs. I think that is un-American.

To those who don't think defense is important, you'll get the best seat on the bench.

And "classically not beautiful" is a fancy term for saying ugly. And denouncing you. And erasing you.

I feel like I represent every young dancer, and even non-dancer, who felt they were not accepted by the ballet world. I'd like to think that they can see themselves in me.

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.