Quote

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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Jamaica Kincaid
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 25
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
St John's
Elanie Potter Richardson
Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson
Together
Categorizing
Something
Inventing
People
Vicious
Invented
Race
Wrong
Ability
Black
Grouped

More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

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Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.
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Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in - and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it.
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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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That the world I was in could be soft, lovely, and nourishing was more than I could bear, and so I stood there and wept, for I didn't want to love one more thing in my life, didn't want one more thing that could make my heart break into a million little pieces at my feet.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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What I don't write is as important as what I write.
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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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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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I'm so used to being misunderstood.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.
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I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.
Jamaica Kincaid
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Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.
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.
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I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.
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I don't feel I'm angry. I feel as though I'm describing something true. If I had stabbed my husband, I could understand being called angry. If I had an affair with my husband's best friend and written about that experience, I could see the anger. But I'm not doing that.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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.
Jamaica Kincaid
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I was just looking at moving to Cambridge, and a house I was looking at cost a million dollars. Because somehow, that's what a house costs. And I was thinking, How can it be? And I was thinking, What am I doing? Am I going to be Niall Ferguson, that horrible man?
Jamaica Kincaid