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Here I am, a product of something really vicious, product of the Atlantic slave trade. And yet, I give nary a thought to some of the awful things happening right now in the world.

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
Give
Awful
Right
Product
Giving
Happenings
Something
Happening
Really
Slave
Things
Trade
Nary
World
Products
Atlantic
Thought
Vicious

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There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.
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He must have smiled at me, though I don't really know, but I don't like to think that I would love someone who hadn't first smiled at me.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.
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I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.
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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.
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What I don't write is as important as what I write.
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My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.
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I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me!
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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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Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.
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I think a woman is powerless if she cannot freely claim the right to her reproductive capacity. Society can talk about anything it likes, except a woman's reproductive existence.
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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?
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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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Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance.
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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!
Jamaica Kincaid