Quotes from Jamaica Kincaid

By then I already knew that I wanted to have a powerful odor and would not care if it gave offense.

I had never imagined my father dying. I had never inagined my parents dying. When I told Mariah this, she said that no one ever thinks their parents will die, ever, and I had to suppress the annoyance I felt at her for once again telling me about everybody when I told her something about myself.

At the door I planted a kiss on Paul's mouth with an uncontrollable ardor that I actually did feel-a kiss of treachery, for I could still taste the other man in my mouth.

But something that never escapes me as I putter about the garden, physically and mentally: desire and curiosity inform the inevitable boundaries of the garden, and boundaries, especially when they are an outgrowth of something as profound as the garden with all its holy restrictions and admonitions, must be violated.

All roads come to an end, and all ends are the same, trailing off into nothing; even an echo eventually will be silenced" (Kincaid 215).

For some people, a fixed state of irritation is oxygen. I understand this all too well.

She always said that she respected and liked us all equally, and I have to say that that attitude didn't go down well with me, accustomed as I was to being singled out and held up in a special way.

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.

this is how you smile to someone you don't like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don't like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely;

I began to feel alternately too big and too small. First, I grew so big that I took up the whole street; then I grew so small that nobody could see me — not even if I cried out.

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.

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.

No action in the present is an action planned with a view of its effect on the future. When the future, bearing its own events, arrives, its ancestry is then traced in a trancelike retrospect, at the end of which, their mouths and eyes wide with their astonishment, the people in a small place reveal themselves to be like children being shown the secrets of a magic trick.

When I looked at them, they made up a sea.

She smelled sometimes of lemons, sometimes of sage, sometimes of roses, sometimes of bay leaf. At times I would no longer hear what it was she was saying; I just liked to look at her mouth as it opened and closed over words, or as she laughed. How terrible it must be for all the people who had no one to love them so and no one whom they loved so, I thought.

I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true. And so I made pleasant little noises that showed both modesty and appreciation, but inside I was making a vow to erase from my mind, line by line, every word of that poem.

I had one more thing to add to my expanding world.

I was numb, but it was from not knowing just what this new life would hold for me.

Isn't that the last straw; for not only did we have to suffer the unspeakableness of slavery, but the satisfaction to be had from "We made you bastards rich" is taken away, too.

Mariah says, "I have Indian blood in me," and underneath everything I could swear she says it as if she were announcing her possession of a trophy. How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?

plunge ahead, put one foot in front of the other, straighten your back and your shoulders and everything else that is likely to slump, buck up and go forward, and in this way, every obstacle, be it physical or only imaged, falls face down in obeisance and in absolute defeat...

That "these people" were ourselves, that this insistence on mistrust of others—that people who looked so very much like each other, who shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement, should be taught to mistrust each other, even as children, is no longer a mystery to me.

I liked that sentence then and I like that sentence now but then I had no way of making any sense of it, I could only keep it in my mind's eye, where it rested and grew in the embryo that would become my imagination

Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of.