Quote

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

Jamaica Kincaid

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jamaica Kincaid
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 25
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
St John's
Elanie Potter Richardson
Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson
Element
Elements
Consciousness
Time
People
Controls

More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

Image
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.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided. This is the life I have. This is the life I write about.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
I'm so used to being misunderstood.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
When I'm writing, I think about the garden, and when I'm in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
There are things that make us choose, on certain days, on certain nights, the opposite of love, in all its variations. But I want to acknowledge that with love and hate it's not simply one or the other. It's at least two, three, four, five different emotions existing at once, side by side, a broad spectrum of things alive.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it's because I'm thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it's all coming back to writing.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
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
Image
That the world I was in could be soft, lovely, and nourishing was more than I could bear, and so I stood there and wept, for I didn't want to love one more thing in my life, didn't want one more thing that could make my heart break into a million little pieces at my feet.
Jamaica Kincaid