Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

“Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seemed to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants? You will have to accept that this is mostly your fault.”

“The Syrians and Lebanese are called ‘those foreigners’ even though most of them have acquired Antiguan citizenship.”

“She told me that she always encouraged her girls and her girls’ children to use the library, and by her girls she means grownup Antiguan women.”

“The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being.”

“You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him—why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument?”

“I can imagine that if my life had taken a certain turn, there would be the Barclays Bank, and there I would be, both of us in ashes. Do you every try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past?”

“If you were to ask why you would be told that the banks are encouraged by the government to make loans available for cars, but loans for houses not so easily available.”

“Their ancestors were not as clever in the way yours were and not ruthless in the way yours were, for then would it not be you who would be in harmony with nature and backwards in that charming way?”

“A ugly thing, that us what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing [...] and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have paused cannot stand you.”

“The government of Antigua allowed some special ammunition to be tested in Antigua—ammunition that the government knew very well was to be shipped to the government of South Africa.”

“This wrong can never be made right and only the impossible can make me still: can a way be found to make what happened not have happened?”

“That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere.”

“There must have been some good people among you, but they stayed home. And that is the point. That is why they are good. They stayed home.”

“There they were, strangers in someone else’s home, and then they refused to talk to their hosts or have anything human, anything intimate, to do with them.”

“There was a […] school which only in my lifetime began to accept girls who were born outside a marriage in Antigua […] it had never dawned on anyone that this was a way of keeping black children out of this school.”

“I was sitting across from an Englishman, one of those smart people who know how to run things [...] but who now, since the demise of the empire, have nothing to do; they look so sad, sitting on the rubbish heap of history.”

“The people in a small place cannot give an exact account, a complete account, of themselves. The people in a small place cannot give an exact account, a complete account of events.”

“We thought they were un-Christian-like; we thought they were small-minded; we thought they were like animals, a bit below human standards as we understood those standards to be.”

“Our perception of this Antigua—the perception we had of this place ruled by these bad-minded people—was not a political perception. The English were ill-mannered, not racists.”

“In a small place, people cultivate small events. The small event is isolated, blown up, turned over and over, and then absorbed into the everyday.”