Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

I'm not a billionaire, what a tragedy.

Only the poor are handicapped by honor.

We Poor Cousins don’t care at all though, except for when we’re on welfare, broke, starving, unable to buy cool high-tops for our children or pay for their university tuition or purchase massive fourth homes on private islands with helicopter landing pads. But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.

It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.

We live increasingly in a world of haves and have-nots, of gated communities next to ghettos, of extreme poverty and unbelievable riches. Some enjoy rights that are completely denied to others. Relative inequalities are exploding, and the world's poorest, despite all the advances of globalisation, may even be getting poorer.

Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread?

Poverty can teach lessons that privilege cannot.

That some are poorer than others, ever was and ever will be: And that many are naturally querulous and envious, is an Evil as old as the World.

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.

I couldn't feel good about myself hanging out in Armani clothes when my girlfriend can't even pay her heating bill. I'd feel foul and I'd be embarrassed.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

Poverty is the parent of revolution.

The poor developed an envy and an extreme jealousy, born of the realization that they are as worthy, or even more worthy than the wealthy, and are nonetheless afflicted with poverty, hunger, misery, and contempt.

When I read in newspapers that farmers are dying because of water shortage, I felt deeply pained that we have best of everything, yet we complain so much, whereas there are people who do not even have access to basic necessities of life.

We, as actors, see luxury around us, but when we step out, we see the struggle and reality which people are going through.

Pale and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food; hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet of brittle glass--an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering figures stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India.

How like a railway tunnel is the poor man's life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!

We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

I can't help but react to the painful realities of the two-tiered society we live in, where the signs of poverty and inequity are everywhere. Almost twenty five percent of our children live at or below the poverty line. We expect the no-option life cycle of the poor to be interrupted by the weak social safety net and then wonder why building more jails doesn't solve the problems.

The rich man has his motorcar, His country and his town estate, He smokes a fifty-cent cigar And jeers at Fate. He frivols through the livelong day, He knows not Poverty, her pinch. His lot seems light, his heart seems gay; He has a cinch. Yet though my lamp burns low and dim, Though I must slave for livelihood- Think you that I would change with him? You bet I would!

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.