Jamaica Kincaid Quotes - Page 2

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

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

Tomorrow exists even though I may not exist in it.

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.

I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.

In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other. And the important thing isn't whether I'm angry. The more important thing is, is it true? Do these things really happen?

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

Had the Holocaust happened in Tahiti or the Congo, as it has; had it happened in South America, as it has; had it happened in the West Indies, as it has - you must remember that within fifty years of Columbus's arrival, only the bones remained of the people called the Arawaks, with one or two of them in Spain as specimens. Had the Holocaust committed under the Nazis happened somewhere else, we wouldn't be talking about it the way we talk about it.

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.

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.

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

One doesn't have to pursue unhappiness. It comes to you. You come into the world screaming. You cry when you're born because your lungs expand. You breathe. I think that's really kind of significant. You come into the world crying, and it's a sign that you're alive.

I like to be depressing. I feel it's my duty to make everyone a little less happy. You know that line in the Declaration of Independence, "the pursuit of happiness"? I've come to think that it has no meaning at all. You cannot pursue happiness. And to think that this bad little sentence has determined our lives.

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

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.

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

One's obligation every day, is to choose to follow the nobler one.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

What frustrates me is to see African-Americans behave as though what European-Americans say is worthwhile. It simply isn't. It's just some silly people who can make laws and have the power to enforce them. I'm often amazed at the conversations black people have about themselves. They ought to be having these conversations about white people. It's white people who are flawed and at fault.

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.

The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.