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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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Jamaica Kincaid
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 25
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
St John's
Elanie Potter Richardson
Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson
People
Bronte
Charlotte
Princess
Loved
Littles
Wanted
Little
Way

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.
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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!
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He must have smiled at me, though I don't really know, but I don't like to think that I would love someone who hadn't first smiled at me.
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When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.
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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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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.
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What I don't write is as important as what I write.
Jamaica Kincaid
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When once I got to America I fell in love with hippie culture, and I've always wanted to live in the country and grow organic vegetables.
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.
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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.
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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.
Jamaica Kincaid
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Once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted they are just human beings.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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.
Jamaica Kincaid