A Quote by Jamaica Kincaid
If I actually ran the world, I'd do it from the kitchen. It's not anything deliberate or a statement or anything, that's just how I understand things. It's arranged along informal lines.
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This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.
I have a lack of practical skills. I can't mend anything or do anything manly; I don't understand how anything works.
I grew up watching my mom in the kitchen, that's how I know anything about cooking. I've always wanted to go to a culinary class actually.
So the big question is, "Well, do I just dump all those unwanted things and try to start fresh?" And we say, no. You just set the Tone, where you are, by looking for things to appreciate. And by setting your Tone in a very clear deliberate way, anything that doesn't match it gravitates out of your experience, and anything that does match it gravitates into your experience. It is so much simpler than most of you are allowing yourself to believe.
If writing has taught me anything, it's that you don't actually understand anything until you can express it in words.
A woman who ran a feminist organization in India told me one thing that stands out for her is bride burning. If a groom's family doesn't like an arranged marriage and they want to get rid of the woman, in-laws may set fire to her in the kitchen, or she may commit suicide in a "kitchen fire".
I just don't trust any of it. Every time I read something about how there's been another ridiculous climb of the Dow Jones, there's a part of me that goes, “This can't be good.” None of this is real money. You know what I mean? It's not like there's actually more of anything. It's just ideas. When people are getting richer and richer but they're not actually producing anything, it can't end well.
Man is just a memory. You understand things around you by the help of the knowledge that was put in you. You perhaps need the artist to explain his modern art, but you don't need anybody's help to understand a flower. You can deal with anything, you can do anything if you do not waste your energy trying to achieve imaginary goals.
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
Robert De Niro taught me how to listen, and how to be part of the conversation. It's not just about reading your lines and saying what's in the script; you have to understand your character, along with the other characters so that you can always respond.
There's no way we can possibly understand anything. But we can see things, we can perceive things, and we can wonder. We can just be in a world of awe and wonder. That's the best we can do.
I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.
Every man comes into the world with a predisposition to grow along certain lines, and growth is easier for him along those lines than in any other way.
[Barack] Obama can draw lines for himself and his country, not for other countries. We have our red lines, like our sovereignty, our independence, while if you want to talk about world red lines, the United States used depleted uranium in Iraq, Israel used white phosphorus in Gaza, and nobody said anything. What about the red lines ? We don't see red lines. It's political red lines.
Of all formal things in the world, a clipped hedge is the most formal; and of all the informal things in the world, a forest tree is the most informal.
I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything. Or these lines will come into my head and I'll write 'em down in a little book, just little sets of lines, but I won't try to make stories or poems out of them. I'm doing a lot of that now, just the lines.
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