Jamaica Kincaid Quotes - Page 5

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• The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Editors, Rivers

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

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• The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Race, America, Holocaust

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

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• In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, "You know, what you did was incredibly wrong."

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, White, Black

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

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• My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Mets, Dismissal

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

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• I wouldn't mind being labeled as "angry," if it wasn't used once again to denigrate and belittle.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Mind, Used, Belittle

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

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• The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Romance, Diversion

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

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• None of us seem to think that we should draw a line under what would be a satisfactory amount of wealth.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Thinking, Would Be, Lines

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

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• The strange thing about my life is that I came to America at about the time when racial attitudes were changing. This was a big help to me. Also, the people who were most cruel to me when I first came to America were black Americans. They made absolute fun of the way I talked, the way I dressed. I couldn't dance. The people who were most kind and loving to me were white people. So what can one make of that? Perhaps it was a coincidence that all the people who found me strange were black and all the people who didn't were white.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Fun, Attitude, People

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• A tourist is an ugly human being.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Tourists, Ugly, Humans

  1988 A Small Place.

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• 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.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Thinking, Race

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

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• If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Crap, Ifs

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

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• There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Differences, Bravery, Stupidity

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• 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, Knows, Has Beens

  Jamaica Kincaid (1996). “The Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel”, p.60, Macmillan

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• I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Fiction, Want, Persons

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

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• I've written a book about my mother, and I don't remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Mother, Book, People

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

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• Most of the nations that have serious gardening cultures have, or had, empires. You can't have this luxury of pleasure without somebody paying for it. This is nice to know. It's nice to know that when you sit down to enjoy a plate of strawberries, somebody got paid very little so that you could have your strawberries. It doesn't mean the strawberries will taste different, but it's nice to enjoy things less than we do. We enjoy things far too much, and it leads to incredible pain and suffering.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Pain, Nice, Mean

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• I'm always telling my students go to law school or become a doctor, do something, and then write. First of all you should have something to write about, and you only have something to write about if you do something.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, School, Doctors

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

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• 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

  Daughter, Mother, Children

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

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• The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Sound, Novel

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

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• 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, Use

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• 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

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• My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Disappointment, Lost, Grows

  Jamaica Kincaid (2000). “At the Bottom of the River”, p.23, Macmillan

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• I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Thinking, Cooking, Dishes

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• 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, I Can

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• So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Writing, Fiction, Useless

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

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