Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

Books teach children to see the world through the eyes of others and empathise with others. It's about the story.

Acting is the business of truth, so that we can see ourselves reflected back and learn.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

Taking on different characters and seeing things through the eyes of different people is interesting to me. When I look at what people are going through in life, I try to understand their story.

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart.

Our job is not to set things right but to see them right.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

As soon as you think you know someone else's truth better than they do, you are in deep water.

Sometimes films ignore other points of view because it's simpler to tell the story that way, but the more genuine and sympathetic you are to different points of view and situations, the more real the story is.

I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That's one of the highlights of working in fiction.

The escape to an unchallenging fairy tale can be very nice and I'm all for that, but film can also challenge you to confront the realities of our world.

I want to see children curled up with books, finding an awareness of themselves as they discover other people's thoughts. I want them to make the connection that books are people's stories, that writing is talking on paper, and I want them to write their own stories. I'd like my books to provide that connection for them.

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.

Walk a mile in my shoes is good advice. Our children will learn to respect others if they are used to imagining themselves in another's place.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

It's often difficult to get perspective on your own stories, on your own experiences, without talking them through with someone who is genuinely interested in thinking about them. And that's the key.

You have to figure out who the right person is to tell the story. And often, people who are very self-aware will only sound as if they are pontificating if they tell the story.

Literature helps us transcend ourselves.

I think that good storytelling of any kind does promote a humility in that it encourages you to see the world the way that other people see it.

I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.