Top 140 Jamaica Kincaid Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

2. “Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

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

— Jamaica Kincaid

4. “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

5. “Like father like son, like mother like daughter!”

— Jamaica Kincaid

6. “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

7. “A tourist is an ugly human being.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

8. “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

9. “There’s something to be said about a slightly plump person – you have just enough of too much.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

10. “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

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

— Jamaica Kincaid

12. “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

13. “There’s a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

14. “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

15. “For isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?”

— Jamaica Kincaid

16. “Isn’t it the most blissful thing in the world to be away from everything you have ever known – to be so far away that you don’t even know yourself anymore and you’re not sure you ever want to come back to all of the things you’re a part of?”

— Jamaica Kincaid

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

— Jamaica Kincaid

18. “The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

19. “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

20. “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

21. “I’m always surprised to hear or read my work described, “In angry tones, she says.” No! In truthful tones! Does truth have a tone? I don’t know.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

22. “Writing is not a profession. It’s a calling. It’s almost holy.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

23. “I am not aware of anything below my neck. I live completely in my head.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

24. “Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in – and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

25. “I write out of defiance.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

26. “Children like their mothers especially to be standing still and watching them, even if they are sleeping. At least that’s how I felt. There’s nothing wrong with the self-interest of children; it’s just the way they are.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

27. “What I don’t write is as important as what I write.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

28. “You know how they say a man’s house is his castle? I think for a woman, it’s her body. I feel so strongly about a woman’s right to choose. This is my Zionism. It’s not a “right” any more than it’s a right to breathe, to take in oxygen.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

29. “Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it’s because I’m thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it’s all coming back to writing.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

30. “My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

31. “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

32. “It’s not that I’m a very good person. It’s that I think I should at least look at the ways in which I am not a good person, the ways in which I so readily become the person who would not notice that the wonderful clothing I’m wearing someone is probably dying for.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

33. “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

34. “I wish that I could love someone so much that I would die from it.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “I swim in a shaft of light, upside down, and I can see myself clearly, through and through, from every angle. Perhaps I stand on the brink of a great discovery.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

39. “I don’t feel I’m angry. I feel as though I’m describing something true. If I had stabbed my husband, I could understand being called “angry.” If I had an affair with my husband’s best friend and written about that experience, I could see the anger. But I’m not doing that.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

40. “If I describe a person’s physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is “black” or “white.” I may describe the color of their skin – black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I’m not talking about race.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

41. “Of course, I now see that good behaviour is the proper posture of the weak, of children.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

42. “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

43. “Isn’t that the last straw; for not only did we have to suffer the unspeakableness of slavery, but the satisfaction to be had from “We made you bastards rich” is taken away, too.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

44. “Here I am, a product of something really vicious, product of the Atlantic slave trade. And yet, I give nary a thought to some of the awful things happening right now in the world.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

45. “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

46. “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.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

47. “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

48. “You mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?”

— Jamaica Kincaid

49. “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

50. “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