Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.

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.

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.

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.

One day I was living silently in a personal hell, without anyone to tell what I felt, without even knowing that the feelings I had were possible to have; and then one day I was not living like that at all. 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 and things you used to do. Your past is the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in.

People don't make changes because things are wonderful.

I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.

People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman.

A great piece of literature encompasses all that is and all that will be.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

I'm so used to being misunderstood.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.

Had the Holocaust happened in Tahiti or the Congo, as it has; had it happened in South America, as it has; had it happened in the West Indies, as it has - you must remember that within fifty years of Columbus's arrival, only the bones remained of the people called the Arawaks, with one or two of them in Spain as specimens. Had the Holocaust committed under the Nazis happened somewhere else, we wouldn't be talking about it the way we talk about it.

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.

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?

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.

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.

Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.

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.

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.

The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.

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."

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.

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.

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.

What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.

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.

But you know, where did the Brontes go to college? Where did George Eliot go to college? Where did Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or George Washington go? Did George Washington go to college? This idea which we now have that people ought to have these credentials is really ridiculous. Where did Homer go to college?

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.

I used to want to be a backup singer. Not a lead singer, because I really can't sing.

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.

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.

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.

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.

Writing is not a profession. It's a calling. It's almost holy.

when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble.

The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not.

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.

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.

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!

Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.

I'm sometimes afraid I'll cross a line and it'll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner.

in the place I am from ... a grave is topped off with a huge mound of loose earth - carelessly, as if piled up in child's play, not serious at all - because death is just another way of being, and the dead will not stay put, and sometimes the actions of the dead are more significant, more profound, than their actions in life, and no structure of concrete or stone can contain them.