Zitat des Tages von Jamaica Kincaid:
One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
People don't make changes because things are wonderful.
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.
I didn't really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn't see how it was possible not to like me!
The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not.
When I write nonfiction, it's always absolutely true. There will be no moment in my nonfiction where I have made something up and have to apologize to the bullying hostess of a talk show.
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 didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail.
Everyone who knew me as a child, they say they're not surprised that I became a writer because I wrote all the time. I don't remember writing, because I wouldn't have had the tools, but I think what they are saying is that I would pretend I was a writer.
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 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.
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 have a sense of destiny because of my mother, who was an extraordinary person but a terrible candidate for mother. She was like the god Cronus, who gave birth to his children in the morning and then ate them at night.
I've never gotten used to winter and never will.
I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to want to be a backup singer. Not a lead singer, because I really can't sing.
Tomorrow exists even though I may not exist in it.
Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.