Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

I stood among them, but not of them: in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens , provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.

The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.

I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.

I have very few friends. I'm an associate of everybody and friend of none.

Divorced from the cosmos, from nature, from society and from each other, we have become fractured and fragmented.

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

I think, at the end of the day, I have an outsider's heart.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood - all those things feel really true to me.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

I don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad. You exist in a bubble. There comes a point where you suddenly feel not really a part of the world, you're just passing through.

When you stop to think about it, so many films today where we don't have that kind of contact are films about alienation. About alienated feelings. We are much more alienated from our colleagues nowadays.

I belong nowhere and to no one.

I don't ever feel like anybody knows who I am.

My first two novels featured narrators who were aggressively unattached: They couldn't form any sort of genuine relationship. So I had thoroughly explored the geography of loneliness and isolation.

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

Sometimes I'm not into being a human.

I don't know what's the matter with me, why I'm so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.

'Community,' that loaded word so beloved of politicians, is simply not a reality in most people's lives. It's normal for us to be cut off from each other.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.