Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart - idea of thing, reality of thing - the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.

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.

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.

In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture - it won’t accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy’ time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener.