Top 100 Jamaica Kincaid Quotes
#1. At Harvard, I got to meet and have dinner with Jamaica Kincaid. Just to have conversations with professors was absolutely amazing.
Yara Shahidi
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Writing is not a profession. It's a calling. It's almost holy.
Jamaica Kincaid
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.
Jamaica Kincaid
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.
Jamaica Kincaid
#11. 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
#12. I am not aware of anything below my neck. I live completely in my head.
Jamaica Kincaid
#13. When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.
Jamaica Kincaid
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.
Jamaica Kincaid
#18. 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
#19. 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
#21. [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
#22. Of course, I now see that good behaviour is the proper posture of the weak, of children.
Jamaica Kincaid
#23. 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
#24. I wish that I could love someone so much that I would die from it.
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'm sometimes afraid I'll cross a line and it'll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner.
Jamaica Kincaid
#27. There's something to be said about a slightly plump person - you have just enough of too much.
Jamaica Kincaid
#28. My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.
Jamaica Kincaid
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.
Jamaica Kincaid
#32. Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.
Jamaica Kincaid
#33. 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
#34. Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.
Jamaica Kincaid
#35. 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
#36. The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.
Jamaica Kincaid
#37. 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
#38. I was numb, but it was from not knowing just what this new life would hold for me.
Jamaica Kincaid
#39. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. When people say you're charming you're in deep trouble.
Jamaica Kincaid
#44. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. I suppose you could say I love outlaw American culture.
Jamaica Kincaid
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#53. 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
#54. This is how you bully a man; this is how an man bullies you.
Jamaica Kincaid
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.
Jamaica Kincaid
#63. I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.
Jamaica Kincaid
#64. 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
#65. I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.
Jamaica Kincaid
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. I'll read anything. In fact, I'll read while I'm doing other things, which is not a good idea.
Jamaica Kincaid
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.
Jamaica Kincaid
#76. It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.
Jamaica Kincaid
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal.
Jamaica Kincaid
#80. "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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#91. The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not.
Jamaica Kincaid
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail.
Jamaica Kincaid
#97. 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
#98. The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.
Jamaica Kincaid
#99. 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
#100. 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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