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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
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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
Culture
Interpreted
Black
Sorts
Away
Minute
Doe
Minutes
Persons
Society
Person
American
Way
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White
More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid
The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
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
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
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
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
Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.
Jamaica Kincaid
If I actually ran the world, I'd do it from the kitchen. It's not anything deliberate or a statement or anything, that's just how I understand things. It's arranged along informal lines.
Jamaica Kincaid
The African-American is often used, and has conspired with the rest of America to be used, as a diversion from America's problems. I wish African-Americans would stop contributing to this sideshow. I also wish all African-Americans would cease to sing and dance just for a generation. I think we provide too much entertainment.
Jamaica Kincaid
One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
Jamaica Kincaid
...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.
Jamaica Kincaid
Race. I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both black and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can't take them seriously.
Jamaica Kincaid
I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.
Jamaica Kincaid
I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don't like tidying up the garden afterwards.
Jamaica Kincaid
A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
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.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
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
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