Quote

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

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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
Cotton
Negro
Calling
Piece
Pieces
Called
Linen
Black
Cloth
Validity

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I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.
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On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.
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I'm so used to being misunderstood.
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The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.
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I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write I just didn't know that it was possible.
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Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet.
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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.
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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.
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The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.
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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.
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It's not that I'm a very good person. It's that I think I should at least look at the ways in which I am not a good person, the ways in which I so readily become the person who would not notice that the wonderful clothing I'm wearing someone is probably dying for.
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