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
Jamaica Kincaid quotes about
persons known ifs
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.
tone doe truthful
I'm always surprised to hear or read my work described, "In angry tones, she says." No! In truthful tones! Does truth have a tone? I don't know.
triumph feels hollow
It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.
dog should-have long
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.
ocean sea islands
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.
husband affair feels
I don't feel I'm angry. I feel as though I'm describing something true. If I had stabbed my husband, I could understand being called "angry." If I had an affair with my husband's best friend and written about that experience, I could see the anger. But I'm not doing that.
mind used belittle
I wouldn't mind being labeled as "angry," if it wasn't used once again to denigrate and belittle.
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.
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 ...
night giving endurance
Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.
daughter mother children
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.
hate night opposites
There are things that make us choose, on certain days, on certain nights, the opposite of love, in all its variations. But I want to acknowledge that with love and hate it's not simply one or the other. It's at least two, three, four, five different emotions existing at once, side by side, a broad spectrum of things alive.
hatred complicated
Life has a truth to it, and it's complicated - it's love and it's hatred.
want fiction persons
I would never never read a work of fiction and want to know about the person's life.