Jamaica Kincaid quotes

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

#Too Much #Enough #Said

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Shock #Inevitable

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

#Intuition #Way #Scientist

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

#Pieces #Literature

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.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Past #Knowing #People

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

#Writing #Garden #Thinking

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

#Hurt #Fear #Ideas

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

#Writing #Schedules #Goes On

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

#Writing #People #Feelings

But some natives--most natives in the world--cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go--so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they enjoy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Reality #Envy #Boredom

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

#Dark #Reality #Ideas

It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Mystery #Born

Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Answers #Mystery #Who You Are

A tourist is an ugly human being.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Tourists #Ugly #Humans

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

#Mother #Echoes #Feels

Once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Add #Noble #Yoke

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

#Writing #Thinking #Way

It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Triumph #Feels

Like father like son, like mother like daughter!
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Daughter #Mother #Father

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

#Thinking #Years #People

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

#Tired #Ideas #Way

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

#Ocean #Islands #Sea

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

#Beautiful #Brother #Men

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

#Dog #Long #Tails

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

#Garden #Enemy #Sculpture

On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#People #Riches #Way

I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card - the kind that has a satin ribbon on it, and quilted hearts and roses, and is expected to be so precious to the person receiving it that the manufacturer has placed a leaf of plastic on the front to protect it.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Live Life #Home #Heart

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

#Real #Thinking #Doubt

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

#Positivity #Pursuit Of Happiness #Thinking

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 in my life, didn't want one more thing that could make my heart break into a million little pieces at my feet.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Heart #Feet #Lovely

I write out of defiance.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Writing #Defiance

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

#Two #Height #Way

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

#People #Trouble #Charming

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

#Native American #Upset #Offensive

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

#Night #Giving #Endurance

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

#Kitchen #World #Lines

People don't make changes because things are wonderful.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#People #Wonderful #Making Changes

I've never gotten used to winter and never will.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Winter #Used

I'll read anything. In fact, I'll read while I'm doing other things, which is not a good idea.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Ideas #Facts

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.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Death #Children #Play

The truth we have to face about the world we live in is that it's driven by profit, and contradictions and doubts are not profitable. They yield wisdom, but wisdom is not profitable. I find pleasure in doubt, but let's face it, my pleasure is not very profitable. To me, the truth is that things mean many things at once, and all of them opposed to each other, and all of them true.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Truth #Mean #Yield

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

#Travel #Stupid #People

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

#Spiritual #Keys #Names

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

#Reading #Writing #Thinking

I'm writing out of desperation. I felt compelled to write to make sense of it to myself - so I don't end up saying peculiar things like 'I'm black and I'm proud.' I write so I don't end up as a set of slogans and clichés.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Writing #Black #Peculiar

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Mother #Wall #Eye

The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Mother #Shadow #Tunes

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

#Lines #Dinner #Sometimes

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

#Philosophy #Book #Reading

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

#Anger #Mad #Firsts

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

#Book #Way #Seven

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

#Want #Singers #Used

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Real #Exciting

Gardeners (or just plain simple writers who write about the garden) always have something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy at any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Writing #Simple #Reality

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

#Garden #Appreciate #Taught

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

#Weed #Garden #Digging

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

#Writing #Certain

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?
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Teaching #College #Ideas

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

#Mother #Daughter #Children

...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

#Memories #Past #Determined

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

#Past #Long #Matter

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

#Persons

What I don't write is as important as what I write.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Writing #Important #Crafts

I wish that I could love someone so much that I would die from it.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Wish

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

#Taken #Simple #World

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

#Girl #Home #Years

I suppose you could say I love outlaw American culture.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Culture #Outlaw #American Culture

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

#Princess #People #Want

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

#World #Melancholy #Abandoned

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

#Real #Past #Rubbish

One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Lonely #Loneliness #Reading

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

#Racism #Black #Grew Up

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

#Mother #Reading #Eden

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

#Country #Hippie #Vegetables

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

#Mother #Brother #My Brother

Tomorrow exists even though I may not exist in it.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#May #Tomorrow

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

#People #Elements #Consciousness

I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Thinking #Cooking #Dishes

I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Successful #Failing #Being Successful

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

#People #Black #Angry

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

#Country #Past #Self

All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself-though, thank God I had never committed them to paper-I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don't believe in that at all anymore.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Believe #Writing #Thinking

I’m so used to being misunderstood,
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Misunderstood #Used #Being Misunderstood

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

#Thinking #Firsts #Cool Love

There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.
-- Jamaica Kincaid

#Differences #Bravery #Stupidity

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

#Opportunity #Space #Silence

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

#Thinking #Race #People

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

#Crush #Travel #Boredom

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

#Children #Writing #My Children

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

#Bed #Pajamas #Sometimes