Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.
Jamaica Kincaid
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Jamaica Kincaid
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 25
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
St John's
Elanie Potter Richardson
Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson
Well
Accused
Romance
Trust
Probably
Knew
True
Someone
Wells
Unromantic
More quotes by 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
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 like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.
Jamaica Kincaid
My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.
Jamaica Kincaid
Once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted they are just human beings.
Jamaica Kincaid
What I don't write is as important as what I write.
Jamaica Kincaid
I've written a book about my mother, and I don't remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question.
Jamaica Kincaid
Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
If I actually ran the world, I'd do it from the kitchen. It's not anything deliberate or a statement or anything, that's just how I understand things. It's arranged along informal lines.
Jamaica Kincaid
But no longer could I aks God what to do, since the answer, I was sure, would not suit me. I could do what suited me know, as long as I could pay for it. 'As long as I could pay for it.' That phrase soon became the tail that wagged my dog. If I had died then, it should have been my epigraph.
Jamaica Kincaid
I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card - the kind that has a satin ribbon on it, and quilted hearts and roses, and is expected to be so precious to the person receiving it that the manufacturer has placed a leaf of plastic on the front to protect it.
Jamaica Kincaid
It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.
Jamaica Kincaid
There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.
Jamaica Kincaid
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.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
It's too easy to say this or that is race, and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.
Jamaica Kincaid
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
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.
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
