Jesmyn Ward Quotes

I remember burying a girl fourteen years of age who had died with a ruptured appendix... I buried a good many people that I knew, some of whom I loved.

Most of my friends are dead. I watched friends die in my arms at 5, 6, 8. When I grew up, the rest of my friends died of AIDS.

At a certain age, death becomes familiar to you-or a loss becomes familiar-the tragedies that are more commonplace in life.

Blood and death. That moves me.

I watched children dying. That will be the image that will stay with me.

There's nothing funny about violence. Death is a real thing.

Cancer has been a dark thread that has run throughout my life. It's taken my friends, my parents. My beautiful son.

When you are confronted with a level of devastating disease and death, you never lose that sense of unbelievable humility.

After so many deaths I live and write.

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.

I was homeless. I lived in a car for a couple of years. That was the worst. But nothing was worse than when I was 40 and my mom passed away. My mother was the best person I ever knew. Those were the two lowest points.

In life, there's a lot that I'm afraid of. Death is always scary. My sister passed away. I'm not scared to die, so much as I was scared to not have her in my life, and it took a long time for me to reconcile that. There are fears everyday, and things that I'm afraid of. I fear everything, but I keep going.

Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

How strange it is, Anna. Yesterday, I have filed in my mind as a good day, notwithstanding it was filled with mortal illness and the grieving of the recently bereft. Yet it is a good day, for the simple fact that no one died upon it. We are brought to a sorry state, that we measure what is good by such a shortened yardstick.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

It's kinda hard to be optimistic, When your homies lying dead on the pavement twisted.

Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.

There might be things more terrible even than losing someone you love by death.

In our memories, there is a graveyard where we bury our dead. They all lie there together, the loved ones and the ones we hated, friends and foes and kin, with no distinction among them. We have to mourn every one of them, because our memories have made them as much a part of us as our bones or our skin. If we don't, we've no right to remember anything at all.

I lost my brother when I was 22. He was only 24. I was always the kind of person to live on the edge, but after that, it made me feel like I could really die. It can really happen. Before then, I never thought it could happen to me or my family.

There is something within our biological structure that screams out and says it is morally wrong for the old to outlive the young. This is one of the times when God doesn’t seem to make sense. This is the worst that life gets.

I don't mourn the dead. I mourn the living.

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.