Quote

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.

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
Woman
Claim
Cannot
Likes
Anything
Claims
Right
Except
Think
Capacity
Thinking
Existence
Reproductive
Talk
Powerless
Society
Freely

More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

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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
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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.
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One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
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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
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It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.
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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I've never gotten used to winter and never will.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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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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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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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The people who invented race, who grouped us together as black, were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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.
Jamaica Kincaid
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My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.
Jamaica Kincaid
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Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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.
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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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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...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
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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