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

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
Lonely
Reading
Makes
Doe
Persons
Person
Manageable
Things
Essentially
Loneliness

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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.
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Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.
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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.
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...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.
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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.
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There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.
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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.
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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.
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I can't get upset about 'offensive to women' or 'offensive to blacks' or 'offensive to Native Americans' or 'offensive to Jews' ... Offend! I can't get worked up about it. Offend!
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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.
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the first step in claiming yourself is anger. You get mad. And you can't do anything before you get angry. And I recommend getting very angry to everyone, anyone.
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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.
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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.
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The people who invented race, who grouped us together as black, were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.
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