Jamaicans Quotes - Page 2

• I came from a very strict background, and didn't hear any Jamaican music when I was growing up.

  Grace Jones

  Growing Up, Jamaican Music, Backgrounds

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• I was the only black girl at my junior high school. I had an afro, a Jamaican accent, I looked really old.

  Grace Jones

  Girl, School, Black

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• My dream of happiness: a quiet spot by the Jamaican seashore . . . hearing the wind sob with the beauty and the tragedy of everything. Sitting under an almond tree, with the leaf spread over me like an umbrella.

  Errol Flynn

  Dream, Wind, Tree

  Errol Flynn, Jeffrey Meyers (2002). “My Wicked, Wicked Ways: The Autobiography of Errol Flynn”, p.413, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Chance has never yet satisfied the hope of a suffering people.

  Marcus Garvey

  Memorial Day, People, Suffering

  Marcus Garvey (2015). “Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey”, p.6, Ravenio Books

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• Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  America, Choices, Black

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013). “Americanah”, p.242, Anchor

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• ...a young man, Jamaican, perhaps, his head circled in a scarf with sunbleached dreadlocks on piled on top, looking like a plate of soft-shell crabs.

  Steve Martin

  Men, Scarves, Shells

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• I'm a Canadian Jamaican. For me, I carry my Jamaican element into my music in my more recent releases.

  Kreesha Turner

  Elements, Release

  Source: www.realstylenetwork.com

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• Let's say you have some chicken stock and you're making soup, and out of everything you can taste, some of the things you put in and some of the things you don't. So you start out with an African spice then you hear some Brazilian music, so then it changes. Then you hear Jamaican and it changes again. And the result depends on how much of each spice you put into it. Now, I've been putting in spices since I started playing professionally in 1945.

  Herbie Mann

  Spices, Soup, Taste

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• When I lived in Jamaican I lived in Kingston, in Spanish Town, and when I go there the only place I want to go is Kingston because that's where the culture is the richest.

  Kreesha Turner

  Culture, Want, Towns

  Source: www.thefader.com

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• We Jamaicans are not so much stressed about time, you know, but you have to stay on top of it. And, of course, on the track, every time we go on the track, it is all about the seconds and the fractions of a second that count.

  Usain Bolt

  Track, Stressed, Goes On

  Interview with Roberta Naas, www.hautetime.com. August 8, 2016.

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• In hindsight I can see that my love for the arts began by watching my father and his colleagues perform on stage in Jamaica, and running a muck among the exhibits of fabulous Jamaican art at the National Gallery while mum was upstairs curating.

  Michael Hyatt

  Running, Art, Father

  Source: www.nerdprobs.com

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• For performances I have my favorite go to's like Prince, Donna Summer, Vanity 6, Sheila E, but it also depends on the type of show I am giving. I could pull references from Broadway musicals, Rock Steady Crew, a Jamaican dancehall or gentlemen's club, etc. all within one show. It truly is a playground with no restrictions for me.

  Mya

  Summer, Vanity, Rocks

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• [I like to cook] Shepherd's pie, which is a classic British dish. But my version reflects my Jamaican roots, because I add jerk to it as well.

  Naomie Harris

  Roots, Pie, Shepherds

  "Naomie Harris is the new James Bond Girl in Skyfall". Interview with Kam Williams, aalbc.com.

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• It was the vehicle that propelled me to international stardom. ("Harder They Come") I was known as a singer/songwriter before that, but people did not know me as an actor. It showed the world where the music I contributed to create was coming from. It opened the gates for Jamaican music, internationally.

  Jimmy Cliff

  People, World, Singers

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• My formative years, until I was 12, was all shaped by Jamaican culture, by that economy, by the people in my family, who are agriculturalists, who were plantation workers, who harvested those crops and took them down to the boats run by the United Food Company, to load those ships at night, hence all the songs that I sing that come from that environment.

  Harry Belafonte

  Running, Song, Night

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• There are so many Jamaican people here in London, it's going to be like being at home for me.

  Usain Bolt

  Home, People, London

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• I wanna open a Jamaican/Irish/Spanish small plate breakfast restaurant and call it Tapas the Morning to Ja.

  Harris Wittels

  Morning, Breakfast, Tapas

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• I didn't think I had a voice at all, and I still think of myself as an interpreter of songs more than a singer. I thought it was too deep; people thought I was a man. I had a very strong Jamaican accent, too; the accent really messed me up for auditions.

  Grace Jones

  Song, Strong, Men

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• [My mother is] a half-Chinese, half-Jamaican woman, who grew up the ninth of nine kids, getting a law degree from Harvard. Academically brilliant, but also incredibly strong-willed and ethical. My mother was like that, my sister is, and my wife is too.

  Harry Connick, Jr.

  Family, Mother, Strong

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• That the language of the poetry of Jamaican music is rastafarian or biblical language cannot simply be put down to the colonizer and his satanic missionaries. The fact is that the historical experience of the black Jamaican is an experience of the most acute human suffering, desolation and despair in the cruel world that is the colonial world.

  Linton Kwesi Johnson

  Biblical, Historical, Black

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• I live in a neighborhood that's really filled with sound - there's a lot of Jamaican auto body shops, and the guys next door play hip hop.

  Sxip Shirey

  Doors, Play, Hip Hop

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• Basically, there were three aspects of dub that influenced dubstep. The most important was playing the instrumental versions of vocal garage tracks, which was a little like what dub was to reggae - the instrumental of a full vocal.The second was dub as a methodology, which, for me, is apparent in all dance music: manipulating sound to create impossible sonic spaces using reverb, echo and such. The third is the influence of the genre called dub. (It became a cliché actually, through sampling old Jamaican films and soundtracks, and adding vocal samples.)

  Kode9

  Echoes, Space, Track

  "The VICE Oral History of Dubstep". www.vice.com. June 23, 2015.

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• I wrote a short article called "Yardcore" for that issue, too, as an attempt to talk about the Jamaican influence on garage, grime and dubstep; as a splicing of soundsystem culture and hardcore.

  Kode9

  Issues, Dubstep, Culture

  "The VICE Oral History of Dubstep". www.vice.com. June 23, 2015.

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• I'm an artist. And I'm happy that I was there at the commencement of this music, this Jamaican music, to put my contribution and help to establish it.

  Jimmy Cliff

  Artist, Helping, Jamaican Music

  Source: www.gq.com

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• Jamaican music can be aggressive, soulful, smooth and exciting all at once - just like hip-hop. At the same time, there's nothing like Jamaica in the United States. Jamaica is its own thing.

  Nas

  Jamaica, Hip Hop, United States

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