Red at the Bone Quotes

“Guess that's where the tears came from, knowing that there's so much in this great big world that you don't have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you'll have one less heartbreak in your life.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Does it sound crazy to say I looked at her and saw the world falling into some kind of order that I didn’t even know it was out of?”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Some evenings I don't know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Look how beautifully black we are. And as we dance, I am not Melody who is sixteen, I am not my parents’ once illegitimate daughter—I am a narrative, someone’s almost forgotten story. Remembered.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“If this moment was a sentence, I’d be the period.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Something about memory. It takes you back to where you were and lets you just be there for a time.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Age will do that to you. Soon as something starts coming to your mind, it snatches it back. Makes you forget the stuff you want to remember. Brings back the memories you’re busy trying to forget.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Some people don't believe that you can meet a person and know that's the person for you for the rest of your life. I'm not going to try to argue with them on that. I know what I know.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“. . . Love changes and changes. Then it changes again. . .”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Every moment for all the generations was leading to you here on my lap, your head against your granddaddy’s chest, already four years old. Hair smelling like coconut oil. Something beneath that, though. Little-girl sweat—almost sour, but then just when I think that’s what it is, it turns, sweetens somehow. Makes me want to sit here forever breathing in your scalp. When did your arms get so long? Your feet so big? These footie pajamas with reindeer all over them remind me of the ones your mama used to wear. She used to fall asleep on my lap just like this. Back at the other house. Oh time time time time. Where’d you go where’d you go? My legs hurt tonight. Another place too—deep in my back somewhere, there’s a dull, aching pain. I try not to think about it. Old people used to always say, You only as old as you feel. Here I am closer to fifty than forty, but I feel older than that most days. Feel like the world is trying to pull me down back into it. Like God went ahead and said, I’ve changed my mind about you, Po’Boy. A bath with Epsom salts helps some evenings. Ginger tea keeps Sabe’s good cooking in my belly. Sitting here holding you at the end of the day—that’s . . . well, I’m not going to lie and say this isn’t the best thing that ever happened to my life because it is. Look at you laughing in your sleep. Got me wondering what you’re dreaming about. What’s making you laugh like that? Tell your granddaddy what’s playing in your pretty brown head, my little Melody. Name like a song. Like you were born and it was cause for the world to sing. You know how much your old granddaddy loves when you sing him silly songs? Sabe says she’s gonna have to get some earplugs if she has to hear one more verse of “Elmo’s World” or that song about how to grow a garden. But me, I can listen to your voice forever. Can’t hear you singing enough.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Fast nights make long days,”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“I love that people think the world is even halfway ready for what we about to bring.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Every day since she was a baby, I’ve told Iris the story. How they came with intention. How the only thing they wanted was to see us gone. Our money gone. Our shops and schools and libraries—everything—just good and gone. And even though it happened twenty years before I was even a thought, I carry it. I carry the goneness. Iris carries the goneness. And watching her walk down those stairs, I know now that my grandbaby carries the goneness too. But both of them need to know that inside the goneness you gotta carry so many other things. The running. The saving. The surviving.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“But she didn’t believe in God. Or Jesus. Or Satan. Or prayer. I believe in words, she said. I believe in numbers and all the history I understand. I believe in things I can see. When he was a little boy she used to hug him and say, And man-oh-man how I believe in you, Aubrey. My love. My light. My life.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Maybe this was love—wanting someone with all the senses.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“You decide you’ve had enough of the neighbors with their looks and their whispers and you rise. You keep your eyes on the priest when your own church people give you their backs on a Sunday and you rise. You rise in your Lord & Taylor cashmere coat and refuse to let shame stand beside you. And when the priest calls your only child into his chambers, rests his hand too high up on her thigh, and tells her about the place in hell that is waiting for her, you return only once more—to damn him. To damn them all. And rise.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“That’s why I don’t buy it when people say children don’t know. That they’re too young to understand. If they can walk and talk, they can understand. You look at how much growing a baby does in the first few years of its life—crawling, walking, talking, laughing. The brain just changing and changing. You can’t tell me all of it’s not becoming a part of their blood. Their memory.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“So why was he feeling like this? Why was he feeling like some promise the universe made had been broken?”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Guess that's where the tears came from, knowing that there's so much in this great big world that you don't have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you'll have one less heartbreak in your life. Oh Lord. Some evenings I don't know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Fells like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“But once, a cardinal alighted on the kitchen windowsill and he found himself squinting long after it had flown away again, trying hard to hold on to its beauty.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Bro, how you doing? You holding on?

Man, you know how it goes.
One day chicken. Next day bone.
Two old men talking”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Some people don't believe you can meet and know that's the person for you for the rest of your life. I'm not going to try to argue with them on that. I know what I know.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“But now I knew there were so many ways to get hung from a cross—a mother’s love for you morphing into something incomprehensible. A dress ghosted in another generation’s dreams. A history of fire and ash and loss. Legacy.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“As the orchestra lifted into "Darling Nikki," I took small breaths to keep tears from coming. I had not expected this --to feel the close of a chapter. The girlhood of my life over now.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn't one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“All over this country people talk about a silver spoon, but truth be told, the spoon is gold. And solid. And stacked high and across. That’s how you have to do if you’re colored, black, Negro, brown . . . Whatever you’re calling yourself that isn’t white. Lord. But when your child shows up with a belly and she’s not even full grown yet, you think for a minute that all those blocks of gold don’t mean a damn thing out in the world if you haven’t even taught your own child how to stay pure. How to hold on. How to grow into womanhood right. You cry into the night until your throat is raw and there’s not another heave left inside of you. Not another drop of water left for your body to squeeze out. Not enough ways left to curse God and yourself.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Afterward, he had held Iris so tightly. If she hadn’t said, I can’t even breathe right now, he would have still been holding on to her, wanting to pull her inside of him. Even bent in front of the side mirror, just inches from him, Iris still felt too far away.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“For too long we said nothing. There was something moving through me like a razor in my chest—I didn’t know then if it was rage or sadness or fear. Maybe Iris felt it too because she moved closer to me, rested her hand on the back of my neck, and pressed her lips into my hair. I wanted more, though—a hug, a kindness whispered into my ear. I wanted her to tell me I was beautiful, that she didn’t care what music played, that she loved me. I wanted her to laugh with me about the ridiculousness of garters and stockings.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“She felt red at the bone - like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“I should have known that sometimes common sense skips a generation.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone