Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe.

the truth is often a mixed message

If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

There is no consensus, there is no homogeneity, there is no truth.

When everything is perfectly orderly and understandable, there has to be one thing that puts everything into question.

I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.

The one recurring theme in my writing, and in my life in general, is confusion. The fact that anytime you think you really know something, you're going to find out you're wrong - that is the rule. The moments where you think you have something figured out, those are the exceptions.

In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth.

The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.

You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.

Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.

Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe.

All things will be ambiguous, for this is the curse of wisdom.

The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.

Sometimes there are no answers.

People are concrescences of ambiguity.

Truth is what most contradicts itself.

Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still

The measure of your enlightenment is the degree to which you are comfortable with paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

Life is a paradox. Every truth has its counterpart which contradicts it; and every philosopher supplies the logic his own undoing.