Quote

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

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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
Silence
Veins
Shall
Shallow
Glimmering
Space
Isolation
Miner
Opportunity
Treasure
Ruthlessly
Find
Opportunities
Plow
Like
Seeking
Silences
Glory
Miners
Deep
Treasures

More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

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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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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
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Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.
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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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
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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
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The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.
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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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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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
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I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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