Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  38 Copy quote

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Too Much, Enough, Said

  50 Copy quote

• People don't make changes because things are wonderful.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  People, Wonderful, Making Changes

  23 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Hatred, Sides, Duty

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Jamaica Kincaid (2002). “Lucy: A Novel”, p.133, Macmillan

  16 Copy quote

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Shock, Inevitable

  39 Copy quote

• 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

  Jamaica Kincaid (2002). “Lucy: A Novel”, p.134, Macmillan

  31 Copy quote

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  People, Black, Angry

  Interview with Alyssa Loh, theamericanreader.com.

  22 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Pieces, Literature

  18 Copy quote

• 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. This is the life I have. This is the life I write about.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Pain, Writing, Reality

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Calling, Holy

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

  6 Copy quote

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, People, Feelings

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  "Jamaica Kincaid Hates Happy Endings". Interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell, www.motherjones.com. September, 1997.

  5 Copy quote

• 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, Reading, Novelists

  "Jamaica Kincaid on writing and 'outlaw American' culture". Interview with Nathan Rostron, www.usatoday.com. March 7, 2013.

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  24 Copy quote

• 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

  "'Our Sassy Black Friend' Jamaica Kincaid". Interview with Hannah Levintova, www.motherjones.com. January/February 2013.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Jamaica Kincaid (2002). “Lucy: A Novel”, p.36, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  16 Copy quote

• ...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

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Race, People, Black

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

• Tomorrow exists even though I may not exist in it.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  May, Tomorrow

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  16 Copy quote

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

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Lonely, Loneliness, Reading

  4 Copy quote

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