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Jamaica Kincaid QUOTES

Jamaica Kincaid QUOTES

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

― Jamaica Kincaid , The Autobiography of My Mother

2 " 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. "

― Jamaica Kincaid , My Brother

3 " 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 , The Autobiography of My Mother

4 " 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 , The Autobiography of My Mother

5 " 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. "

― Jamaica Kincaid , Lucy

6 " 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. "

― Jamaica Kincaid , Lucy

7 " 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 , Annie John

8 " 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. "

― Jamaica Kincaid , Annie John

9 " In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me; all these places were lifeboats to my small drowning soul, for I would imagine myself entering and leaving them, and just that - entering and leaving over and over again - would see me through a bad feeling I did not have a name for. I only knew it felt a little like sadness but heavier than that. "

― Jamaica Kincaid , Lucy

10 " 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 that could make my heart break into a million little pieces at my feet. "

― Jamaica Kincaid , Lucy

11 " 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 "

― Jamaica Kincaid , See Now Then

12 " I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be "

― Jamaica Kincaid

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

― Jamaica Kincaid , The Autobiography of My Mother

14 " No one observed and beheld me, I observed and beheld myself; the invisible current went out and it came back to me. I came to love myself out of defiance, out of despair, because there was nothing else. Such a love will do, but it will only do, it is not the best kind; it has the taste of something left out on a shelf too long that has turned rancid, and when eaten makes the stomach turn. It will do, it will do, but only because there is nothing else to take its place; it is not to be recommended. "

― Jamaica Kincaid

15 " The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable. "

― Jamaica Kincaid , The Autobiography of My Mother

16 " 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. As for hat 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 civilisations, 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 , A Small Place

17 " 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 , Lucy

18 " I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with, knowing it represents a haven. "

― Jamaica Kincaid

19 " When I looked at them sitting around me, the church in the distance, beyond that our school, with throngs of girls crossing back and forth in the schoolyard, beyond that the world, how I wished that everything would fall away, so that suddenly we'd be sitting in some different atmosphere, with no future full of ridiculous demands, no need for any sustenance save our love for each other, with no hindrance to any of our desires, which would, of course, be simple desires — nothing, nothing, just sitting on our tombstones forever. "

― Jamaica Kincaid

20 " I went back to my cabin and lay down on my berth. Everything trembled as if it had a spring at its very center. I could hear the small waves lap-lapping around the ship. They made an unexpected sound, as if a vessel filled with liquid had been placed on its side and now was slowly emptying out. "

― Jamaica Kincaid , Annie John