110+ Jamaica Kincaid Quotes On Education, Family And Seeing England

Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist and essayist. She is best known for her novels Annie John and Lucy, as well as her collection of essays, A Small Place. Kincaid's writing often focuses on themes of colonialism, mother-daughter relationships, and the complexities of being a Caribbean woman living in the United States. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jamaica Kincaid on education, life, family.

Top 10 Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

1. 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.
2. I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.
3. I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.
4. I'm so used to being misunderstood.
5. 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.
6. People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.
7. Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.
8. I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.
9. The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• I used to want to be a backup singer. Not a lead singer, because I really can't sing.
• The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.
• My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.
• I wouldn't mind being labeled as "angry," if it wasn't used once again to denigrate and belittle.
• When I write a book, I hope to be beyond mortal by the time I'm finished.
• I am not aware of anything below my neck. I live completely in my head.
• I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.
• On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.
• I'm sometimes afraid I'll cross a line and it'll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner.
• Writing is not a profession. It's a calling. It's almost holy.

Jamaica Kincaid Quotes About Life

Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. — Jamaica Kincaid

I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite. — Jamaica Kincaid

I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life. — Jamaica Kincaid

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. — Jamaica Kincaid

The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life. — 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

Life has a truth to it, and it's complicated - it's love and it's hatred. — Jamaica Kincaid

What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her. — 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

Jamaica Kincaid Quotes About Love

Love and hatred don't take turns; they exist side by side at the same time. And one's duty, one's obligation every day, is to choose to follow the nobler one. — Jamaica Kincaid

I'm trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it. — Jamaica Kincaid

I had come to feel that my mother's love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn't know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone. — Jamaica Kincaid

I suppose you could say I love outlaw American culture. — Jamaica Kincaid

I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess. — Jamaica Kincaid

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. — Jamaica Kincaid

I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don't like tidying up the garden afterwards. — Jamaica Kincaid

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

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. — Jamaica Kincaid

I would pretend when I was a child that I was Charlotte Brontë, because I'd read Jane Eyre when I was ten and, although I didn't understand it, I loved the idea that this woman had written a book. I wanted to be her. — Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid Quotes About Writing

In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other. And the important thing isn't whether I'm angry. The more important thing is, is it true? Do these things really happen? — Jamaica Kincaid

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

Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it's because I'm thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it's all coming back to writing. — Jamaica Kincaid

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job. — Jamaica Kincaid

I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn't know that it was possible. — Jamaica Kincaid

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write. — Jamaica Kincaid

What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two. — Jamaica Kincaid

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

If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals. — Jamaica Kincaid

I'm always telling my students go to law school or become a doctor, do something, and then write. First of all you should have something to write about, and you only have something to write about if you do something. — Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid Quotes About Gardening

In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture-it won't accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy' time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener. — 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

The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not. — Jamaica Kincaid

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. — Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid Quotes About Fiction

I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place. — Jamaica Kincaid

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. — Jamaica Kincaid

If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race. — Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid Famous Quotes And Sayings

I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition. — Jamaica Kincaid

America is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own traditions - that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self. — 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

But you know, where did the Brontes go to college? Where did George Eliot go to college? Where did Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or George Washington go? Did George Washington go to college? This idea which we now have that people ought to have these credentials is really ridiculous. Where did Homer go to college? — Jamaica Kincaid

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

Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds. — Jamaica Kincaid

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. — Jamaica Kincaid

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them. — Jamaica Kincaid

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! — Jamaica Kincaid

Sometimes when someone says something stupid, my friends and I just read the reviews out loud and collapse with laughter at the stupidity of it all. — 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

In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, "You know, what you did was incredibly wrong." — Jamaica Kincaid

That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him. — Jamaica Kincaid

in the place I am from ... a grave is topped off with a huge mound of loose earth - carelessly, as if piled up in child's play, not serious at all - because death is just another way of being, and the dead will not stay put, and sometimes the actions of the dead are more significant, more profound, than their actions in life, and no structure of concrete or stone can contain them. — Jamaica Kincaid

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. — Jamaica Kincaid

I write out of defiance. — 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

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

None of us seem to think that we should draw a line under what would be a satisfactory amount of wealth. — Jamaica Kincaid

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

I swim in a shaft of light, upside down, and I can see myself clearly, through and through, from every angle. Perhaps I stand on the brink of a great discovery. — Jamaica Kincaid

The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it's the wrong thing. It's not a profession. — Jamaica Kincaid

I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail. — Jamaica Kincaid

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. — Jamaica Kincaid

when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble. — Jamaica Kincaid

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

You know how they say a man's house is his castle? I think for a woman, it's her body. I feel so strongly about a woman's right to choose. This is my Zionism. It's not a "right" any more than it's a right to breathe, to take in oxygen. — Jamaica Kincaid

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. — Jamaica Kincaid

One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person. — Jamaica Kincaid

People don't make changes because things are wonderful. — Jamaica Kincaid

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

People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman. — Jamaica Kincaid

I can write anywhere. I actually wrote more than I ever did when I had small children. My children were never a hindrance. — Jamaica Kincaid

When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself. — Jamaica Kincaid

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable. — Jamaica Kincaid

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

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

Gardeners (or just plain simple writers who write about the garden) always have something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy at any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that. — Jamaica Kincaid

I read about writers who have routines. They write at certain times of the day. I can't do that. I am always writing-but in my head. — Jamaica Kincaid

Someone who knew me well once accused me of being unromantic. And that's probably true: I don't trust romance. — Jamaica Kincaid

I'm always surprised to hear or read my work described, "In angry tones, she says." No! In truthful tones! Does truth have a tone? I don't know. — Jamaica Kincaid

I didn't think of myself as an outsider because of my race because... where I grew up I was the same race as almost everyone else... It is true that I noticed things that no one else seemed to notice. And I think only people who are outsiders do this. — Jamaica Kincaid

The families of rabbits or woodchucks will eat the salad greens just before they are ready to be picked; I plot ways to kill these animals but can never bring myself to do it. — Jamaica Kincaid

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world. — Jamaica Kincaid

That is how I came to think that heavy and hard was the beginning of living, real living; and though I might not end up with a mark on my cheek, I had no doubt that I would end up with a mark somewhere. — Jamaica Kincaid

The night-soil men can see a bird walking in trees. It isn't a bird. It is a woman who has removed her skin and is on her way to drink the blood of her secret enemies. It is a woman who has left her skin i a corner of a house made out of wood. It is a woman who is reasonable and admires honeybees in the hibiscus. — Jamaica Kincaid

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself? — Jamaica Kincaid

Like father like son, like mother like daughter! — Jamaica Kincaid

I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule. — Jamaica Kincaid

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. — Jamaica Kincaid

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

I've never let the criticism deter me. — Jamaica Kincaid

It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring. — Jamaica Kincaid

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

I like to be in my pajamas all day. Sometimes I don't wash for days because I like to read and sit around. I like to eat in bed. — 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

I don't really do anything that isn't about writing, and I don't really know who I am if I'm not thinking about writing. — Jamaica Kincaid

This naming of things is so crucial to possession - a spiritual padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away - that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names. — Jamaica Kincaid

There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much. — Jamaica Kincaid

In isolation I ruthlessly plow the deep silences, seeking my opportunities like a miner seeking veins of treasures. In what shallow glimmering space shall I find what glimmering glory? — Jamaica Kincaid

if I'd thought that nobody would like it as I was writing it, I would have written it even more. But I never think of the audience. I never think of people reading. I never think of people, period. — Jamaica Kincaid

I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending. — Jamaica Kincaid

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

I wish that I could love someone so much that I would die from it. — Jamaica Kincaid

Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you. — Jamaica Kincaid

Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I'm just the same. I'm always disappointed that I'm just the same, but not enough to never do it again! — Jamaica Kincaid

I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through. — 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

Life Lessons by Jamaica Kincaid

1. Jamaica Kincaid's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and respecting one's own culture and heritage.
2. She also encourages readers to challenge the status quo and question the power dynamics of society.
3. Finally, her work highlights the need to recognize and celebrate the unique experiences of individuals and communities.