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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
Would
Woman
Jane
Idea
Pretend
Understand
Ten
Didn
Although
Ideas
Loved
Wanted
Written
Book
Child
Eyre
Children
Read
Charlotte

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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.
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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.
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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.
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There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much.
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My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.
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Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.
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What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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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So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.
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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.
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I've never gotten used to winter and never will.
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when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble.
Jamaica Kincaid