Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

A rubber neck is a necessary part of equipment.

I live in Soho in lower New York; there's tons and tons of tourists right outside my door step, obviously. Most of them are European, and all of them have guidebooks. I never see anyone looking at a phone.

Teachers didn't like me very much. They thought I was just this punk kid and they always wanted to kick me out.

I'm afraid I didn't really like Caracas in Venezuela. From what I saw it seemed so crime-ridden that you really have to be on your guard all the time.

I was perhaps the worst student you have ever seen. You know, I thought I was stupid, all my classmates thought I was stupid, so there was general agreement.

It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it.

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing.'

There's no amount of money that makes you feel better when people think of you as a joke or a hack or a failure or ugly or stupid or morally empty.

All the stuff about being a drinking club, or having players who were not good enough, I treat as rubbish.

The reason for my big success in England was the Brits - they started wanting to go on holidays, like Spain and Greece.

We cannot learn to love other tourists,-the laws of nature forbid it,-but, meditating soberly on the impossibility of their loving us, we may reach some common platform of tolerance, some common exchange of recognition and amenity.

I don't like Switzerland; it has produced nothing but theologians and waiters.

I sort of use as my guiding principle that show The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Whenever possible, do the stupid thing.

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

There is no place so benighted and godforsaken that some moron won't go there on vacation. People could be living in an open sewer and swallowing dirt to stop the hunger, and there'd be a couple from Larchmont wearing comfortable shoes there to take pictures of them.

Someone on Twitter sent me a page from a textbook. It had a picture of a football player next to a picture of me. The juxtaposition was meant to illustrate two meanings of "offensive." Seriously. It broke my heart. It's that accepted what I do is offensive?

We've got a pretty close family. Just ended fourteen years of travel hockey with two boys. My daughter was always a part of that. So there's a lot of trips to the hockey games. As I tell idiotic, stupid, youth-sport parents, it's about the drive there and the drive back, not about the trophy or how your kid played. We've always had a good relationship with our kids. You're driving with them and talking to them at the age of eight. It became this adventure and they learned to love it. You connect, you really do. It's not for every family.

Nonsense! The most hopelessly stupid man is he who is not aware that he is wise.

When you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It's only painful and difficult for others. The same applies when you are stupid.

Dee Dee Dee dosen't mean mentally retarded. It means stupid. This song goes out to all the stupid people out there. Your gonna find this song hilarious, and you don't even know it's about you.

it is not every tourist who bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which turns a trial into a blessing.

The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.

It's stupid to miss a thing when there are so many people to miss instead, but I miss this train already, and all the others that carried me through the city, my city, after I was brave enough to ride them. I brush my fingers over the car wall, just once, and then jump.

One thing about tourists is that it is very easy to get away from them. Like ants they follow a trail and a few yards each side of that trail there are none.