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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.

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
Way
Least
Readily
Good
Wonderful
Clothings
Would
Someone
Clothing
Think
Become
Notice
Thinking
Persons
Wearing
Person
Dying
Look
Probably
Looks
Ways

More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

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It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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.
Jamaica Kincaid
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On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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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
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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
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The photograph of my brother that is in this album shows a young man, beautiful and perfect in the way of young people, for young people are always perfect and beautiful until they are not, until the moment they just are not.
Jamaica Kincaid
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Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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It's very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it's interpreted in some way.
Jamaica Kincaid
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What I don't write is as important as what I write.
Jamaica Kincaid
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No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.
Jamaica Kincaid
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There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much.
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.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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
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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.
Jamaica Kincaid
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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.
Jamaica Kincaid
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The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.
Jamaica Kincaid
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A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.
Jamaica Kincaid
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There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.
Jamaica Kincaid