Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

It is a crime among them to kill any newly-born infant. They hold that the souls of all who perish in battle or by the hands of the executioner are immortal. Hence a passion for propagating their race and a contempt for death. They are wont to bury rather than to burn their dead

There is nothing--no, nothing--innocent or good, that dies and is forgotten; let us hold to that faith or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in the cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those that loved it, and play its part through them in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes or drowned in the deep sea.

The reason for such an “unreasonable” attitude with me is that I am not at all sure what will happen to me after death. I have good reasons to assume that things are not finished with death. Life seems to be an interlude in a long story.

Dying doesn't end anything - it just changes where you are

Now when I die, I shall only be dead.

We die, and we do not die.

If I'm killed - if I'm removed - there is nowhere else for me to go but to my ancestors.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

I think death is just a transition to another state of consciousness.

I don't know anything about the afterlife because I haven't been there yet.

Everybody is going to die, so people are enthralled by the possibility that they don't have to completely die, that there is something that comes afterward. It's like if you're going to France for the summer, you're going to read up on it. Everyone just wants to know where they're going, or if they're going anywhere.

Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of.

Death is the beginning of something.

Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.

In Egypt, the living were subordinate to the dead.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

My death is incidental, and I worry very much about my loved ones and, you know, would like to make it as easy as possible for them. Or wish I could will away whatever, you know, the sadness they will feel when I die. But for me, nothing. The world goes on.

I don't believe in the afterlife.

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.

I called my book 'When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead' because that's the truth. I will keep talking until the big hand comes down from Heaven. But I am a spiritual man and I believe that even that does not have to be the end.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

Lies here food for the worms yet the work shall not be lost.

I hope that I am out of the music business when I meet God.

I think people need reassurance that there is an afterlife. That's perfectly understandable.

They say that the Dead die not, but remain Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth. I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these, In wise majestic melancholy train, And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas, And men, coming and going on the earth.