Caribbean Literature Quotes

“For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?”
― Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

“Memory is a river. Memory is a pebble at the bottom of the river, slippery with the moss of our living hours. Memory is a tributary, a brackish stream returning to the oceam that dreamt it. Memory is the sea. Memory is the house on the sand with a red door I have stepped through, trying to remember the history of the waves.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How To Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir

“To ask how I feel about writing is to ask how I feel about breathing.”
― Shakirah Bourne, In Time of Need

“My heart was burning for home. For a moment I felt like crying out, but at the moment of greater pain my mother's voice came back to me. It was as if she was here and talking, Stay and take an education, boy. Take it in, That's the main thing.”
― Michael Anthony, The Year in San Fernando (Cws

“Where we are going, someone else is there and/or has been there. Where we are now is where someone else will be.”
― Dwight Thompson, Pivot: Pinecones & Spaceships Volume I

“And immediately we rushed like horses, wild with the knowledge of this song, and bolted into a startingly loud harmony:
'Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves; Britons, never-never-ne-verr shall be slaves!'
and singing, I saw the kings and the queens in the room with us, laughing in a funny way, and smiling and happy with us. The headmaster was soaked in glee. And I imagined all the glories of Britannia, who, or what or which, had brought us out of the ships crossing over from the terrible seas from Africa, and had placed us on this island, and had given us such good headmasters and assistant masters, and such a nice vicar to teach us how to pray to God - and he had come from England; and such nice white people who lived on the island with us, and who gave us jobs watering their gardens and taking out their garbage, most of which we found delicious enough to eat...all through the ages, all through the years of history; from the Tudors on the wall, down through the Stuarts also on the wall, all through the Elizabethans and including those men and women singing in their hearts with us, hanging dead and distant on our schoolroom walls; Britannia, who, or what or which, had ruled the waves all these hundreds of years, all these thousands and millions of years, and kept us on the island, happy - the island of Barbados (Britannia the Second), free from all invasions. Not even the mighty Germans; not even the Russians whom our headmaster said were dressed in red, had dared to come within submarine distance of our island! Britannia who saw to it that all Britons (we on the island were, beyond doubt, little black Britons, just like the white big Britons up in Britannialand. The headmaster told us so!) - never-never-ne-verr, shall be slaves!”
― Austin Clarke, Amongst Thistles and Thorns

“I believe a writer is...the scribe-griot of his/her nation. S/he has the power to incite, ignite, excite, pacify, edify, motivate and eliminate others with the slash of a pen, click of a mouse or swipe of a finger. Though coloured by time, class, age, geography, childhood and other factors, a writer crystallises a slice of his/her society's culture, mores and its dark and light truths. A writer makes everything real.”
― Sandra Sealy

“Yuh cyah vex when soca playin”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman, Kaya Abaniah and the Father of the Forest

“The news about Eddoes and the shoes travelled round the street pretty quickly. My mother was annoyed. She said, ‘You see what sort of thing life is. Here I is, working my finger to the bone. Nobody flinging me a pair of shoes just like that, you know. And there you got that thin-arse little man, doing next to nothing, and look at all the things he does get.”
― V.S. Naipaul, Miguel Street

“Never give up!
It's not that we fall, it's how we rise.
Sometimes you have to take night and make day!
When one door closes, many others will beckon you.
Perseverance & determination can break any barrier.
Its not how others see you, but how you see yourself; so crystalize that vision of you.”
― Roselle Thompson

“Back on the island my parents come from, every one’s a little brujita. Everyone has the potential to unearth their powers and trap a lover, create a child, heal the sick, end their enemies, and even transform their life. Not everyone taps into that knowing, but it is always there at their disposal. People understand that while some are sprinkled with a little magic, others are born with the don, with the gift, with the full force. It is what it is. My people believe deeply, even if they wear their Catholic cloak on a daily basis for safety. But when shit hits the fan — and shit always hits the fan — they turn to the soil, to the skies, and the leaders of the other side.

But this isn’t the island. This is not a place with an open vein of magic. This is a place where an entire race has oppressed and sat above the rest. On this land, the blood- spills always bubble back up to the surface, and instead of cleaning it, the oppressors constantly cover it up with cement. Entonces dime, who here would believe my vision?”
― Lorraine Avila, The Making of Yolanda la Bruja

“My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth's dead eye
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the soil
it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky
it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience.”
― Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

“When I was a girl, my mother had taught me to read the waves of her seaside as closely as a poem. There was nothing broken that the sea couldn’t fix, she always said.”
― Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon