Jamaica Kincaid

Novelist

1949-05-25

Books by Jamaica Kincaid

Annie John
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Lucy. Roman
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A small place
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Quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

Among the beliefs I held about the world was that being beautiful should not matter to a woman, because it was one of those things that would go away--your beauty would go away, and there wouldn't be anything you could do to bring it back.
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I never wanted to live in that place again, but if for some reason I was forced to live there again, I would never accept the harsh judgments made against me by people whose only power to do so was that they had known me from the moment I was born.
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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.
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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.
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This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can't go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.
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It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.
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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.
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This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can't go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.
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It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.
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I never wanted to live in that place again, but if for some reason I was forced to live there again, I would never accept the harsh judgments made against me by people whose only power to do so was that they had known me from the moment I was born.
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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.
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Among the beliefs I held about the world was that being beautiful should not matter to a woman, because it was one of those things that would go away--your beauty would go away, and there wouldn't be anything you could do to bring it back.
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People only say I'm angry because I'm black and I'm a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do.
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When I write nonfiction, it's always absolutely true. There will be no moment in my nonfiction where I have made something up and have to apologize to the bullying hostess of a talk show.
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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.
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Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.
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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.
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A tourist is an ugly human being.
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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.
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