Quotes from Jamaica Kincaid

I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.

I'm so used to being misunderstood.

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

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.

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.

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

the first step in claiming yourself is anger. You get mad. And you can't do anything before you get angry. And I recommend getting very angry to everyone, anyone.

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

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.

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.

I like cooking, but I think someone else ought to do the dishes.

When I moved out here to California, I became obsessed with geology. It's impossible not to be interested in the earth if you live in a place like this. I started to read a lot of geology, much to the horror of my friends.

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.

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.

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.

Like father like son, like mother like daughter!

But there was no use pretending: I was not the sort of person who counted blessings; I was the sort of person for whom there could never be enough blessings.

When people say you're charming you're in deep trouble.

Of course, I now see that good behaviour is the proper posture of the weak, of children.

Isn't it the most blissful thing in the world to be away from everything you have ever known--to be so far away that you don't even know yourself anymore and you're not sure you ever want to come back to all of the things you're a part of?

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

Have you ever wondered to yourself why it is that all people like me seem to have learned from you is how to imprison and murder each other, how to govern badly, and how to take the wealth of our country and place it in Swiss bank accounts? Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants? You will have to accept that this is mostly your fault

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.

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.