Top 140 Jamaica Kincaid Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

52. “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.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

53. “I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn’t know that it was possible.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

54. “I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

55. “That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

56. “The photograph of my brother that is in this album shows a young man, beautiful and perfect in the way of young people, for young people are always perfect and beautiful until they are not, until the moment they just are not.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

57. “A great piece of literature encompasses all that is and all that will be.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

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

— Jamaica Kincaid

59. “I only now understand why it is that people lie about their past, why they say they are one thing other than the thing they really are, why they invent a self that bears no resemblance to who they really are, why anyone would want to feel as if he or she belongs to nothing, comes from no one, just fell out of the sky, whole.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

60. “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.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

61. “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

62. “The night-soil men can see a bird walking in trees. It isn’t a bird. It is a woman who has removed her skin and is on her way to drink the blood of her secret enemies. It is a woman who has left her skin i a corner of a house made out of wood. It is a woman who is reasonable and admires honeybees in the hibiscus.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

63. “I began to feel alternately too big and too small. First, I grew so big that I took up the whole street; then I grew so small that nobody could see me – not even if I cried out.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

64. “No action in the present is an action planned with a view of its effect on the future. When the future, bearing its own events, arrives, its ancestry is then traced in a trancelike retrospect, at the end of which, their mouths and eyes wide with their astonishment, the people in a small place reveal themselves to be like children being shown the secrets of a magic trick.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

65. “Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

66. “I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I’m alone in the world and I’m just sort of abandoned.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

67. “But no longer could I aks God what to do, since the answer, I was sure, would not suit me. I could do what suited me know, as long as I could pay for it. ‘As long as I could pay for it.’ That phrase soon became the tail that wagged my dog. If I had died then, it should have been my epigraph.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

68. “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

69. “Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I’m just the same. I’m always disappointed that I’m just the same, but not enough to never do it again!”

— Jamaica Kincaid

70. “Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?”

— Jamaica Kincaid

71. “She smelled sometimes of lemons, sometimes of sage, sometimes of roses, sometimes of bay leaf. At times I would no longer hear what it was she was saying; I just liked to look at her mouth as it opened and closed over words, or as she laughed. How terrible it must be for all the people who had no one to love them so and no one whom they loved so, I thought.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

72. “How do you get to be a person who is made miserable because the weather changed its mind, because the weather doesn’t live up to your expectations? How do you get to be that way?”

— Jamaica Kincaid

73. “Something I had always known – the way I knew my skin was the color brown of a nut rubbed repeatedly with a soft cloth, or the way I knew my own name – something I took completely for granted, “the sun is shining, the air is warm,” was not so.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

74. “When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

75. “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

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

— Jamaica Kincaid

77. “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.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

78. “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

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

— Jamaica Kincaid

80. “Life has a truth to it, and it’s complicated – it’s love and it’s hatred.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “I’ve never gotten used to winter and never will.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

85. “I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

86. “I never wanted to live in that place again, but if for some reason I was forced to live there again, I would never accept the harsh judgments made against me by people whose only power to do so was that they had known me from the moment I was born.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

87. “A psychiatrist once asked me to draw a picture of my family. This is when I was a member of a family of four. I drew the three other people in the family first, bodies and heads. And then, last, I began to draw myself – but gave up.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

88. “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

89. “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.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

90. “It’s very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it’s interpreted in some way.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

91. “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

92. “Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that’s probably true: I don’t trust romance.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

93. “It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

94. “Sometimes when someone says something stupid, my friends and I just read the reviews out loud and collapse with laughter at the stupidity of it all.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

95. “The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it’s the wrong thing. It’s not a profession.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

96. “I had never imagined my father dying. I had never inagined my parents dying. When I told Mariah this, she said that no one ever thinks their parents will die, ever, and I had to suppress the annoyance I felt at her for once again telling me about everybody when I told her something about myself.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

97. “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?”

— Jamaica Kincaid

98. “I’m sometimes afraid I’ll cross a line and it’ll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

99. “I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

100. “I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.”

— Jamaica Kincaid