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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

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Jamaica Kincaid
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 25
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
St John's
Elanie Potter Richardson
Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson
Moments
Past
Matter
Long
Always
Love
Present
Happy
Moment

More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

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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
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I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card - the kind that has a satin ribbon on it, and quilted hearts and roses, and is expected to be so precious to the person receiving it that the manufacturer has placed a leaf of plastic on the front to protect it.
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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
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A piece of cloth that is called linen has more validity than calling you and me black or negro. Cotton has more validity as cotton than yours and my being black.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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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
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There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much.
Jamaica Kincaid
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What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.
Jamaica Kincaid
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What I don't write is as important as what I write.
Jamaica Kincaid
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All of these declarations of what writing ought to be, which I had myself-though, thank God I had never committed them to paper-I think are nonsense. You write what you write, and then either it holds up or it doesn't hold up. There are no rules or particular sensibilities. I don't believe in that at all anymore.
Jamaica Kincaid
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A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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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
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Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say Oh, she's so angry. If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes Oh, she's autobiographical.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.
Jamaica Kincaid