Jamaica Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California as the "Josephine Olp Weeks Chair and Professor of Literature" as well as the "Professor of African and American studies in Residence" at Harvard during the academic year. Kincaid is an award-winning writer...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 May 1949
kitchen world lines
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.
people slave good-things
The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.
noble yoke rubbish
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.
writing defiance
I write out of defiance.
spiritual keys names
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 ...
dark reality ideas
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.
real exciting something-real
Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?
mystery born
It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.
answers mystery who-you-are
Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.
tourists ugly humans
A tourist is an ugly human being.
people want able
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.
tired ideas way
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.
thinking race people
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.
opportunity space silence
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?