Explore Quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.

Like father like son, like mother like daughter!

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.

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