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I would pretend when I was a child that I was Charlotte Brontë, because I'd read Jane Eyre when I was ten and, although I didn't understand it, I loved the idea that this woman had written a book. I wanted to be her.
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
Wanted
Written
Book
Child
Eyre
Children
Read
Charlotte
Would
Woman
Jane
Idea
Pretend
Understand
Ten
Didn
Although
Ideas
Loved
More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid
Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
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
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 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
...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
I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write I just didn't know that it was possible.
Jamaica Kincaid
Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.
Jamaica Kincaid
I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.
Jamaica Kincaid
Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.
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
Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.
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
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
Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say Oh, she's so angry. If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes Oh, she's autobiographical.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
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.
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
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
