Top 100 Jamaica Kincaid Quotes
#1. It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.
Jamaica Kincaid
#2. I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.
Jamaica Kincaid
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I'll read anything. In fact, I'll read while I'm doing other things, which is not a good idea.
Jamaica Kincaid
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.
Jamaica Kincaid
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.
Jamaica Kincaid
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. "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
#23. 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
#24. Writing is not a profession. It's a calling. It's almost holy.
Jamaica Kincaid
#25. 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
#26. I wish that I could love someone so much that I would die from it.
Jamaica Kincaid
#27. 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
#28. Of course, I now see that good behaviour is the proper posture of the weak, of children.
Jamaica Kincaid
#29. 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
#30. There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.
Jamaica Kincaid
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. I am not aware of anything below my neck. I live completely in my head.
Jamaica Kincaid
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.
Jamaica Kincaid
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. I suppose you could say I love outlaw American culture.
Jamaica Kincaid
#42. 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
#43. 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
#45. When people say you're charming you're in deep trouble.
Jamaica Kincaid
#46. 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
#47. My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.
Jamaica Kincaid
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.
Jamaica Kincaid
#51. Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.
Jamaica Kincaid
#52. A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.
Jamaica Kincaid
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. When people say you're charming you are in deep trouble.
Jamaica Kincaid
#64. It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.
Jamaica Kincaid
#65. 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
#66. Life has a truth to it, and it's complicated - it's love and it's hatred.
Jamaica Kincaid
#67. Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?
Jamaica Kincaid
#68. I wouldn't mind being labeled as "angry," if it wasn't used once again to denigrate and belittle.
Jamaica Kincaid
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.
Jamaica Kincaid
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. I used to want to be a backup singer. Not a lead singer, because I really can't sing.
Jamaica Kincaid
#76. The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang.
Jamaica Kincaid
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. A great piece of literature encompasses all that is and all that will be.
Jamaica Kincaid
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. By then I already knew that I wanted to have a powerful odor and would not care if it gave offense.
Jamaica Kincaid
#89. 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
#90. 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
#92. Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.
Jamaica Kincaid
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.
Jamaica Kincaid
#99. 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
#100. 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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