Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

The way that you remember your life, it's never linear. You have flashes of different moments of your life, and the flashes aren't equal; they have different styles.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

My memories of events and games are fragmented.

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.

I always try to write from memory, and I always try to use memory as an editor. So when I'm thinking of something like a relationship or whatever, then I'm letting my memory tell me what the important things were.

Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.

In my work you often get an abrupt shift in time, a jolt. But the emotional logic will take the reader on. I hope. I trust. After all, our memories do not work with any sequential logic.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

it it strange, suddenly having a memory come back out of nowhere. you think you're going crazy; you wonder where this recollection has been hiding all your life. you try to push it away, because you think you've hammered out the whole timeline of your life, but then you see that one extra moment, and suddendly you are breaking apart what you though was a solid segment, and seeing it for what it is: just a string of events, shoulder to shoulder, and a gap where there is room for one more.

No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.

Memory is a net: one that finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook, but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking.

When it comes to memories of that iconic type, memories that are burned into you, I have maybe ten or so from my childhood. I'm a bad rememberer of situations. I forget almost everything as soon as it happens.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

You never realize what a good memory you have until you try to forget something.

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it.

The images from the book you make in your head are always going to be the best images.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

Just luxuriate in a certain memory, and the details will come. It's like a magnet attracting steel filings.

One has to spend time sort of really going back through one's memories. When you do start doing that then, you do recall more as time goes on.

Memories come out only when you spend time with a person.

One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened.