The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apartโidea of thing, reality of thingโthe wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.
Jamaica KincaidI was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.
Jamaica KincaidI 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.
Jamaica KincaidFriendship 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.
Jamaica KincaidAmerica is not so much a country as it is an idea, and that must be why so many people are drawn to it, the idea of it, the idea that you might be free of your past, free of the traditions that kept you in your own traditions - that is the idea of it: freedom from your very own self.
Jamaica Kincaid