"I liked that sentence then and I like that sentence now but then I had no way of making any sense of it, I could only keep it in my mind's eye, where it rested and grew in the embryo that would become..."
- Jamaica Kincaid
"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"
"Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you."
"No one observed and beheld me, I observed and beheld myself; the invisible current went out and it came back to me. I came to love myself out of defiance, out of despair, because there was nothing els..."
"The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable."
"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, ..."
"I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card - the kind that has a satin ribbon on it, and quilted hearts and ro..."
"I understood finding the place you are born in an unbearable prison and wanting something completely different from what you are familiar with, knowing it represents a haven."
"When I looked at them sitting around me, the church in the distance, beyond that our school, with throngs of girls crossing back and forth in the schoolyard, beyond that the world, how I wished that e..."
"I went back to my cabin and lay down on my berth. Everything trembled as if it had a spring at its very center. I could hear the small waves lap-lapping around the ship. They made an unexpected sound,..."