34 Motivational Quotes By Jamaica Kincaid On Relationships And Life

Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.

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

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.

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.

I wish that I could love someone so much that I would die from it.

That was the moment he got the idea he possessed me in a certain way, and that was the moment I grew tired of him.

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

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

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.

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

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

Like father like son, like mother like daughter!

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

Of course his life could be found in the pages of a book; I had just begun to notice that the lives of men always are.

When people say you’re charming you’re in deep trouble.

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

But there was no use pretending: I was not the sort of person who counted blessings; I was the sort of person for whom there could never be enough blessings.

Do you see the queer thing about people like me? Sometimes we hold your retribution.

On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.

It was hollow, my triumph, I could feel that, but I held on to it just the same.

By then I already knew that I wanted to have a powerful odor and would not care if it gave offense.

That is how I came to think that heavy and hard was the beginning of living, real living; and though I might not end up with a mark on my cheek, I had no doubt that I would end up with a mark somewhere.

At the door I planted a kiss on Paul's mouth with an uncontrollable ardor that I actually did feel-a kiss of treachery, for I could still taste the other man in my mouth.

All roads come to an end, and all ends are the same, trailing off into nothing; even an echo eventually will be silenced” (Kincaid 215).

But mostly I had books - so many books, and they were mine; I would not have to part with them. It had always been a dream of mine to just own a lot of books, to never part with a book once I had read it.

I was afraid of the dead, as was everyone I knew. We were afraid of the dead because we never could tell when they might show up again.

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

She always said that she respected and liked us all equally, and I have to say that that attitude didn't go down well with me, accustomed as I was to being singled out and held up in a special way.

Of course, I now see that good behaviour is the proper posture of the weak, of children.