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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on personal transformation through experiences that deepen understanding.
Jamaica Kincaid emphasizes the profound impact of life experiences on personal growth and knowledge. Experiencing challenges and changes can lead to new insights and a deeper understanding of oneself and the world, suggesting that true knowledge comes from lived experiences rather than mere theoretical understanding.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth during a team-building workshop.
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'.
Gardeners (or just plain simple writers who write about the garden) always have something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy at any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that.
I read about writers who have routines. They write at certain times of the day. I can't do that. I am always writing-but in my head.
I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.
I didn't think of myself as an outsider because of my race because... where I grew up I was the same race as almost everyone else... It is true that I noticed things that no one else seemed to notice. And I think only people who are outsiders do this.
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.
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
Average working people need more fresh starts. Big corporations, banks, and Donald Trump need fewer.
In terms of closing Rikers, we have to close Rikers, but we have to ensure that we're not just taking - that we're not continuing to incarcerate the same level of people. It doesn't do us much good if we close Rikers and then take that same amount of people and just distribute them to be incarcerated elsewhere.
What people have the capacity to choose, they have the ability to change.
If it had not been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.
There's no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.
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