Jacqueline Amanda Woodson:
(born 12 February 1963).
American author of books for children and young adults. She is best known for “Miracle’s Boys” and her Newbery Honour-winning titles “Brown Girl Dreaming”, “After Tupac and D Foster”, “Feathers” and “Show Way”. After serving as Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was appointed National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for 2018 and 2019 by the Library of Congress. Her novel “Another Brooklyn” was shortlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. She won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2018 and the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2020. In 2020, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
He loved October. Had always loved it. There was something sad and beautiful about it: the ending and beginning of things.
The sentence is about how October holds two feelings at once. It marks the end of summer and the year’s slow decline into winter, which is the “sad” part. It is also a month of new starts, with a new school year and new relationships, and that is the “beautiful” part. The phrase “the ending and beginning of things” fits the novel closely, because the story is about a love beginning and about a life that is cut short. Read with the whole book in mind, the line also works as quiet foreshadowing: Miah is someone who feels the bittersweet side of things.
Outside the book, people quote it for a more general reason. It says something true about autumn: the melancholy of things fading and the hope of things starting can sit side by side.
Origin:
The “he” is Jeremiah (Miah), a Black teenager from Harlem who attends an elite private school in Manhattan. There he meets Ellie (Elisha), a white Jewish girl, and the two fall in love. The novel follows their relationship and the racism and prejudice they run into, and it ends in tragedy. The October line comes early in the book, as part of how we get to know Miah’s inner life.
Author:
Several quote collections attribute it to Jacqueline Woodson, “If You Come Softly”. It’s a young adult novel from 1998′
