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 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.
I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.
...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.
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.
I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.
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.
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.
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.
The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.
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.
What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.
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.
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.
What I don't write is as important as what I write.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I'm sometimes afraid I'll cross a line and it'll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.
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.
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.
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?
I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail.
I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn't know that it was possible.
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.
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.
