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.

Jamaica Kincaid

Categorized in : Names Spiritual Keys

There's something to be said about a slightly plump person—you have just enough of too much.

Jamaica Kincaid

too-much enough said

Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet.

Jamaica Kincaid

hurt fear ideas

People don't make changes because things are wonderful.

Jamaica Kincaid

making-changes wonderful people

Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.

Jamaica Kincaid

book

I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition.

Jamaica Kincaid

scientist intuition way

I had been a girl of whom certain things were expected, none of them too bad: a career as a nurse, for example; a sense of duty to my parents; obedience to the law and worship of convention. But in one year of being away from home, that girl had gone out of existence.

Jamaica Kincaid

girl home years

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.

Jamaica Kincaid

novelists reading book

It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.

Jamaica Kincaid

skin-color skins race

People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman.

Jamaica Kincaid

angry black people

One day I was living silently in a personal hell, without anyone to tell what I felt, without even knowing that the feelings I had were possible to have; and then one day I was not living like that at all. 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 and things you used to do. Your past is the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in.

Jamaica Kincaid

knowing people past

I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.

Jamaica Kincaid

feelings writing people

I've come to see that I'm saying something that people generally do not want to hear.

Jamaica Kincaid

want people

Had the Holocaust happened in Tahiti or the Congo, as it has; had it happened in South America, as it has; had it happened in the West Indies, as it has - you must remember that within fifty years of Columbus's arrival, only the bones remained of the people called the Arawaks, with one or two of them in Spain as specimens. Had the Holocaust committed under the Nazis happened somewhere else, we wouldn't be talking about it the way we talk about it.

Jamaica Kincaid

west-indies talking years

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

Jamaica Kincaid

determined memories past

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

Jamaica Kincaid

jokes writing jobs

The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.

Jamaica Kincaid

slave good-things people

When I'm writing, I think about the garden, and when I'm in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.

Jamaica Kincaid

garden writing thinking

One's obligation every day, is to choose to follow the nobler one.

Jamaica Kincaid

obligation

A great piece of literature encompasses all that is and all that will be.

Jamaica Kincaid

pieces literature

It's very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it's interpreted in some way.

Jamaica Kincaid

black white doe