Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Jamaica Kincaid, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Jamaica Kincaid quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 180 Jamaica Kincaid quotes for you to read and share.

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It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I'm sometimes afraid I'll cross a line and it'll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture - it won't accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy' time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I've never let the criticism deter me. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me! -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Life has a truth to it, and it's complicated - it's love and it's hatred. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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It's not that I'm a very good person. It's that I think I should at least look at the ways in which I am not a good person, the ways in which I so readily become the person who would not notice that the wonderful clothing I'm wearing someone is probably dying for. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry." If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes "Oh, she's autobiographical." -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The photograph of my brother that is in this album shows a young man, beautiful and perfect in the way of young people, for young people are always perfect and beautiful until they are not, until the moment they just are not. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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There's something to be said about a slightly plump person - you have just enough of too much. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The Holocaust happened in Europe, and that's important to how it is viewed. Had Europeans done such a thing in the far corners of the earth, rather than on their own doorstep, it might not be mentioned in the history books. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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If I actually ran the world, I'd do it from the kitchen. It's not anything deliberate or a statement or anything, that's just how I understand things. It's arranged along informal lines. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I had come to feel that my mother's love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn't know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I don't feel I'm angry. I feel as though I'm describing something true. If I had stabbed my husband, I could understand being called "angry." If I had an affair with my husband's best friend and written about that experience, I could see the anger. But I'm not doing that. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I was just looking at moving to Cambridge, and a house I was looking at cost a million dollars. Because somehow, that's what a house costs. And I was thinking, "How can it be?" And I was thinking, "What am I doing? Am I going to be Niall Ferguson, that horrible man? -- Jamaica Kincaid
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For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private; it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Writing is not a profession. It's a calling. It's almost holy. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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At the door I planted a kiss on Paul's mouth with an uncontrollable ardor that I actually did feel-a kiss of treachery, for I could still taste the other man in my mouth. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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When I moved out here to California, I became obsessed with geology. It's impossible not to be interested in the earth if you live in a place like this. I started to read a lot of geology, much to the horror of my friends. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I think a woman is powerless if she cannot freely claim the right to her reproductive capacity. Society can talk about anything it likes, except a woman's reproductive existence. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it's the wrong thing. It's not a profession. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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It's too easy to say this or that is "race," and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Children like their mothers especially to be standing still and watching them, even if they are sleeping. At least that's how I felt. There's nothing wrong with the self-interest of children; it's just the way they are. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it's because I'm thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it's all coming back to writing. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I liked that sentence then and I like that sentence now but then I had no way of making any sense of it, I could only keep it in my mind's eye, where it rested and grew in the embryo that would become my imagination -- Jamaica Kincaid
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There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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[Unhappiness] comes to you. You come into the world screaming. You cry when you're born because your lungs expand. You breathe. I think that's really kind of significant. You come into the world crying, and it's a sign that you're alive. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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plunge ahead, put one foot in front of the other, straighten your back and your shoulders and everything else that is likely to slump, buck up and go forward, and in this way, every obstacle, be it physical or only imaged, falls face down in obeisance and in absolute defeat... -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I'm so used to being misunderstood. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I suppose you could say I love outlaw American culture. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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America is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own traditions - that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart - idea of thing, reality of thing - the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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But no longer could I aks God what to do, since the answer, I was sure, would not suit me. I could do what suited me know, as long as I could pay for it. 'As long as I could pay for it.' That phrase soon became the tail that wagged my dog. If I had died then, it should have been my epigraph. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Isn't it the most blissful thing in the world to be away from everything you have ever known
to be so far away that you don't even know yourself anymore and you're not sure you ever want to come back to all of the things you're a part of? -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I had one more thing to add to my expanding world. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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By then I already knew that I wanted to have a powerful odor and would not care if it gave offense. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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She had too much of everything, and so she longed to have less; less, she was sure, would bring her happiness. To me it was a laugh and a relief to observe the unhappiness that too much can bring; I had been so used to observing the reults of too little. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don't like tidying up the garden afterwards. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I'm trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I like to be in my pajamas all day. Sometimes I don't wash for days because I like to read and sit around. I like to eat in bed. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I'm just the same. I'm always disappointed that I'm just the same, but not enough to never do it again! -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Something I had always known - the way I knew my skin was the color brown of a nut rubbed repeatedly with a soft cloth, or the way I knew my own name - something I took completely for granted, "the sun is shining, the air is warm," was not so. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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This naming of things is so crucial to possession - a spiritual padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away - that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names ... -- Jamaica Kincaid
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What I don't write is as important as what I write. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I'm always telling my students go to law school or become a doctor, do something, and then write. First of all you should have something to write about, and you only have something to write about if you do something. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I used to want to be a backup singer. Not a lead singer, because I really can't sing. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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That the world I was in could be soft, lovely, and nourishing was more than I could bear, and so I stood there and wept, for I didn't want to love one more thing that could make my heart break into a million little pieces at my feet. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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People only say I'm angry because I'm black and I'm a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I can't get upset about 'offensive to women' or 'offensive to blacks' or 'offensive to Native Americans' or 'offensive to Jews' ... Offend! I can't get worked up about it. Offend! -- Jamaica Kincaid
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My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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She always said that she respected and liked us all equally, and I have to say that that attitude didn't go down well with me, accustomed as I was to being singled out and held up in a special way. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I've written a book about my mother, and I don't remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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A tourist is an ugly human being -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I wouldn't mind being labeled as "angry," if it wasn't used once again to denigrate and belittle. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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When I'm writing, I think about the garden, and when I'm in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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At the time I was taught to read, it was an Eden-like time of my life. My mother adored me. Everyone adored me. So I associate reading with enormous pleasure. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with, knowing it represents a haven. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I never wanted to live in that place again, but if for some reason I was forced to live there again, I would never accept the harsh judgments made against me by people whose only power to do so was that they had known me from the moment I was born. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I began to feel alternately too big and too small. First, I grew so big that I took up the whole street; then I grew so small that nobody could see me - not even if I cried out. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I have a photograph of myself when I was 2 years of age, and I don't recognize the person in the photograph. She doesn't look anything like me, and I can't find any trace of her in me physically. And yet I remember her very, very well - even her anxiety. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Looking at the horizon again, I saw a lone figure coming toward me, but I wasn't frightened because I was sure it was my mother. As I got closer to the figure, I could see that it wasn't my mother, but still I wasn't frightened because I could see that it was a woman. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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If I'd thought that nobody would like it as I was writing it, I would have written it even more. But I never think of the audience. I never think of people reading. I never think of people, period. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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But there was no use pretending: I was not the sort of person who counted blessings; I was the sort of person for whom there could never be enough blessings. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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"Race." I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both "black" and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can't take them seriously. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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A psychiatrist once asked me to draw a picture of my family. This is when I was a member of a family of four. I drew the three other people in the family first, bodies and heads. And then, last, I began to draw myself - but gave up. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I've never gotten used to winter and never will. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I read about writers who have routines. They write at certain times of the day. I can't do that. I am always writing-but in my head. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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In isolation I ruthlessly plow the deep silences, seeking my opportunities like a miner seeking veins of treasures. In what shallow glimmering space shall I find what glimmering glory? -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I was numb, but it was from not knowing just what this new life would hold for me. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Of course his life could be found in the pages of a book; I had just begun to notice that the lives of men always are. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Isn't that the last straw; for not only did we have to suffer the unspeakableness of slavery, but the satisfaction to be had from "We made you bastards rich" is taken away, too. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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That is how I came to think that heavy and hard was the beginning of living, real living; and though I might not end up with a mark on my cheek, I had no doubt that I would end up with a mark somewhere. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Among the beliefs I held about the world was that being beautiful should not matter to a woman, because it was one of those things that would go away
your beauty would go away,and there wouldn't be anything you could do to bring it back. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I don't really do anything that isn't about writing, and I don't really know who I am if I'm not thinking about writing. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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It's very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it's interpreted in some way. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I grew up in this poor place, with very limited circumstances, at about 16 years of age was sent by my family to work, and instead of remaining in the position into which I was sent, I somehow worked my way out of it without any help from anyone, just luck. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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That "these people" were ourselves, that this insistence on mistrust of others - that people who looked so very much like each other, who shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement, should be taught to mistrust each other, even as children, is no longer a mystery to me. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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She talked in one of her memoirs of ignoring her little brother when she was supposed to be looking after him: I liked reading a book much more than I liked looking after him (and even now I like reading a book more than I like looking after my own children ... ) -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I did not care about being a virgin and had long been looking forward to the day when I could rid myself of that status, but when I saw how much it mattered to him to be the first boy I had been with, I could not five him such a hold over me. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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When once I got to America I fell in love with hippie culture, and I've always wanted to live in the country and grow organic vegetables. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Love and hatred don't take turns; they exist side by side at the same time. And one's duty, one's obligation every day, is to choose to follow the nobler one. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I didn't think of myself as an outsider because of my race because ... where I grew up I was the same race as almost everyone else ... It is true that I noticed things that no one else seemed to notice. And I think only people who are outsiders do this. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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People don't make changes because things are wonderful. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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All roads come to an end, and all ends are the same, trailing off into nothing; even an echo eventually will be silenced (Kincaid 215). -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don't see them because I am reading the landscape. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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When I write a book, I hope to be beyond mortal by the time I'm finished. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The first step in claiming yourself is anger. You get mad. And you can't do anything before you get angry. And I recommend getting very angry to everyone, anyone. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I'm always surprised to hear or read my work described, "In angry tones, she says." No! In truthful tones! Does truth have a tone? I don't know. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I went back to my cabin and lay down on my berth. Everything trembled as if it had a spring at its very center. I could hear the small waves lap-lapping around the ship. They made an unexpected sound, as if a vessel filled with liquid had been placed on its side and now was slowly emptying out. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I can write anywhere. I actually wrote more than I ever did when I had small children. My children were never a hindrance. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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A piece of cloth that is called "linen" has more validity than calling you and me "black" or "negro." "Cotton" has more validity as cotton than yours and my being "black." -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I picked a name that was a combination of an island name and a very English name. Havana was one choice and Dominico was another, but I liked the combination of Jamaica Kincaid. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself? -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Of course, I now see that good behaviour is the proper posture of the weak, of children. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Like father like son, like mother like daughter! -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I wish that I could love someone so much that I would die from it. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I'll read anything. In fact, I'll read while I'm doing other things, which is not a good idea. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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You know how some people write every day at a certain point? I'm not like that. I carry something around for a long time. I weigh the words and the sentences. I weigh the paragraphs. The process is much more meditative for me. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Here I am, a product of something really vicious, product of the Atlantic slave trade. And yet, I give nary a thought to some of the awful things happening right now in the world. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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You know how they say a man's house is his castle? I think for a woman, it's her body. I feel so strongly about a woman's right to choose. This is my Zionism. It's not a "right" any more than it's a right to breathe, to take in oxygen. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I was afraid of the dead, as was everyone I knew. We were afraid of the dead because we never could tell when they might show up again. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Everyone who knew me as a child, they say they're not surprised that I became a writer because I wrote all the time. I don't remember writing, because I wouldn't have had the tools, but I think what they are saying is that I would pretend I was a writer. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I am not aware of anything below my neck. I live completely in my head. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I have a sense of destiny because of my mother, who was an extraordinary person but a terrible candidate for mother. She was like the god Cronus, who gave birth to his children in the morning and then ate them at night. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other. And the important thing isn't whether I'm angry. The more important thing is, is it true? Do these things really happen? -- Jamaica Kincaid
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If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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How do you get to be a person who is made miserable because the weather changed its mind, because the weather doesn't live up to your expectations? How do you get to be that way? -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in - and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I grew up in a place where books were very, very scarce, and I loved to read. I used to read the writing on my breakfast Ovaltine over and over again because it was in front of me, and I couldn't help but read anything that was in front of me. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I swim in a shaft of light, upside down, and I can see myself clearly, through and through, from every angle. Perhaps I stand on the brink of a great discovery. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I loved very much - and so used to torment until she cried - a girl named Sonia. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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None of us seem to think that we should draw a line under what would be a satisfactory amount of wealth. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Do you see the queer thing about people like me? Sometimes we hold your retribution. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The English language started out as a distortion in my life, but nothing remains the same, and so the distortion is now just normal. That is one of the things that will happen to all distortions: They become normal and turn into something else. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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When people say you're charming you're in deep trouble. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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When people say you're charming you are in deep trouble. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The families of rabbits or woodchucks will eat the salad greens just before they are ready to be picked; I plot ways to kill these animals but can never bring myself to do it ... -- Jamaica Kincaid
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The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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When I write nonfiction, it's always absolutely true. There will be no moment in my nonfiction where I have made something up and have to apologize to the bullying hostess of a talk show. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn't know that it was possible. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I write out of defiance. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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This is how you bully a man; this is how an man bullies you. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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Tomorrow exists even though I may not exist in it. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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But mostly I had books - so many books, and they were mine; I would not have to part with them. It had always been a dream of mine to just own a lot of books, to never part with a book once I had read it. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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A great piece of literature encompasses all that is and all that will be. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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He must have smiled at me, though I don't really know, but I don't like to think that I would love someone who hadn't first smiled at me. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him. -- Jamaica Kincaid
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When I looked at them, they made up a sea. -- Jamaica Kincaid