Jamaica Kincaid

“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.”

“I have a photograph of myself when I was 2 years of age, and I don't recognize the person in the photograph. She doesn't look anything like me, and I can't find any trace of her in me physically. And yet I remember her very, very well - even her anxiety.”

“At the time I was taught to read, it was an Eden-like time of my life. My mother adored me. Everyone adored me. So I associate reading with enormous pleasure.”

“I'm so used to being misunderstood.”

“I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.”

“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.”

“I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.”

“The English language started out as a distortion in my life, but nothing remains the same, and so the distortion is now just normal. That is one of the things that will happen to all distortions: They become normal and turn into something else.”

“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.”

“The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable.”

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

“I grew up in a place where books were very, very scarce, and I loved to read. I used to read the writing on my breakfast Ovaltine over and over again because it was in front of me, and I couldn't help but read anything that was in front of me.”

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

“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”

“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.”

“I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don't like tidying up the garden afterwards.”

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

“For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private; it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided.”

“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 like to be in my pajamas all day. Sometimes I don't wash for days because I like to read and sit around. I like to eat in bed.”