{"author":"Jamaica Kincaid","author_id":"Jamaica+Kincaid","total_quotes":28,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Jamaica Kincaid","tags":["familiarity","family","judgmental","womanhood"],"id":571,"author_id":"Jamaica+Kincaid"},{"text":"Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.","author":"Jamaica Kincaid","tags":["life","mystery","self-awareness"],"id":58042,"author_id":"Jamaica+Kincaid"},{"text":"I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.","author":"Jamaica Kincaid","tags":["life","truth","i am "],"id":63138,"author_id":"Jamaica+Kincaid"},{"text":"Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for hat we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilisations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.","author":"Jamaica Kincaid","tags":["anger","antigua","capitalism","capitalist","colonialism","colonized-frustration","decolonization","frustration","indigenous","indigenous-feminism","perserverance","struggle"],"id":84326,"author_id":"Jamaica+Kincaid"},{"text":"This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can’t everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can’t go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it’s so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.","author":"Jamaica Kincaid","tags":["death"],"id":116156,"author_id":"Jamaica+Kincaid"},{"text":"What I don't write is as important as what I write.","author":"Jamaica Kincaid","tags":["writing-craft"],"id":124630,"author_id":"Jamaica+Kincaid"},{"text":"In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me; all these places were lifeboats to my small drowning soul, for I would imagine myself entering and leaving them, and just that - entering and leaving over and over again - would see me through a bad feeling I did not have a name for. I only knew it felt a little like sadness but heavier than that.","author":"Jamaica Kincaid","tags":["depression","happiness","sadness"],"id":130906,"author_id":"Jamaica+Kincaid"},{"text":"It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.","author":"Jamaica Kincaid","tags":["god","life"],"id":161141,"author_id":"Jamaica+Kincaid"},{"text":"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.","author":"Jamaica Kincaid","tags":["life-experience","life-lessons"],"id":181158,"author_id":"Jamaica+Kincaid"},{"text":"I grew up in this poor place, with very limited circumstances, at about 16 years of age was sent by my family to work, and instead of remaining in the position into which I was sent, I somehow worked my way out of it without any help from anyone, just luck.","author":"Jamaica Kincaid","tags":["work","family","luck "],"id":192148,"author_id":"Jamaica+Kincaid"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":28,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}