Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller. They will not be lost to me.

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
On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.

Jamaica Kincaid
I stood above the land and the sea, and I felt that I was not myself as I had once known myself to be: I was not made up of flesh and blood and muscles and bones and tissue and cells and vital organs but was made up of my will, and over my will I had complete dominion.

Jamaica Kincaid
I shall never have the garden I have in my mind, but that for me is the joy of it; certain things can never be realized and so all the more reason to attempt them A garden, no matter how good it is, must never completely satisfy. The world as we know it, after all, began in a very good garden, a completely satisfying garden—Paradise—but after a while the owner and the occupants wanted more.

Jamaica Kincaid
It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.

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
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
Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, it's because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar.

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
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
I was always being told I should be something, and then my whole upbringing was something I was not: it was English.

Jamaica Kincaid
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
For a short while during the year I was ten, I thought only people I did not know died.

Jamaica Kincaid
When I got home, my mother came toward me, arms outstretched, concern written on her face. My whole mouth filled up with a bitter taste, for I could not understand how she could be so beautiful even though I no longer loved her.

Jamaica Kincaid
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
The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang.

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
As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilizations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.

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
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 is sad that unless you are born a god, your life, from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.

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

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
At that moment, I missed my mother more than I had ever imagined possible and wanted only to live somewhere quiet and beautiful with her alone, but also at that moment I wanted only to see her lying dead, all withered and in a coffin at my feet.

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
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
We were afraid of the dead because we never could tell when they might show up again.

Jamaica Kincaid