Jamaica Quotes

“I heard another disembodied voice: you're going to release a daemon”
― Edward Williams, Framed & Hunted: A True Story of Occult Persecution

“I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.”
― Marcus Garvey

“When you’re in The System, like after being arrested, you’re no longer a participant. You’re being processed. Instead of an easy to ignore, well-greased cog, you become a sharp edge that needs to be ground down.”
― Edward Williams

“Just because I’ve been gone from this country for most of my life doesn’t mean I understand it any less. When I was fifteen I left Jamaica. I knew that I was a lesbian then and, because of what I looked like, I was an out lesbian. It was hard for me. It was hard for the thirteen years I was in England, for various reasons, and it’s going to be difficult here as well. I don’t anticipate anything being easy. But I’d rather suffer the chance of someone accosting me for being a dyke than suffer the emotional violence I’d do to myself if I wasn’t honest about who I am.”
― Fiona Zedde, Bliss

“Across from her, Hunter devoured her meal even more completely than she had. Sinclair watched her sink sharp teeth into the chicken bone, heard it snap, then the soft grunt of satisfaction. She made soft sucking sounds then emptied her mouth of the tiny ground up remains on a corner of her dish. Hunter ate with rabbit-like intensity, biting and sucking and spitting in an even rhythm until all that was left on the plate was a small brown and beige pile of ground bones. She finally looked up and caught Sinclair staring.”
― Fiona Zedde, Bliss

“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

“I feel like I’m on holy ground here, do you?' she called to the crowd through her mic. 'Special spot, special spot,' somebody called back. They were not wrong: what happened here in a mountainous backwater of a colonial outpost had gathered enough momentum to shift the course of history.
Shepherd told the story of the anonymous woman who was said to have started the first trash house fire on the night of December 27, 1831. 'Yes, it led to her death,' she said, 'but it gave birth to abolition within the British Empire. I’m going to rename her tonight. Guess what I’m going to name her? ‘Fire.’ Tonight we christen ‘Fire.’ This time we want to have the flames of passion in our hearts. As I look across the hills, I can almost see the fires lit in 1831. I believe the hills were joyful that night as they witnessed our ancestors stand against oppression and torture.' Her voice rose: 'Ancestors, we see you! We hear you every time we sing or dance. Everything we do, the roots are in what our ancestors did to survive.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“It's not the actual crime that makes me want to leave, it's the possibility that it can happen any time, any second now, even in the next minute. That it might never happen at all, but I think it will happen any second now for the next ten years. Even if it never comes, the point is I'll be waiting for it and the wait is just as bad because you can't do anything else in Jamaica but wait for something to happen to you. This applies to good stuff too. It never happens. All you have is the waiting for it.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“Then the congregation listened as the clock chimed the twelve bars of midnight. At the last one, Knibb shouted: 'The monster is dead! The negro is free! The church 'broke out into one loud and long-continued burst of exultation and joy,' that awoke Knibb’s young son and rattled all the windows. 'Never did I hear such a sound,' Knibb wrote later.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“I grew up with my family in Bellas Gate, in a big old ramshackle house. Deep rural. Mountainous. Mist-covered after the rain. Beautiful. Isolated. No radios. No telephones. Life was sweet. Life was harsh.”
― Trevor Rhone, Bellas Gate Boy

“The will to make life beautiful was strong.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica

“. . . (S)lavery could not function without the lubricant of violence. . . The whip accompanied the lives of the enslaved from the moment they entered an Atlantic slave ship to their dying days in slavery.”
― James Walvin, A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power

“As an author, I am out here being vulnerable with content inspired by real life events sprinkled with imagination. Those with the most criticism for people like me, don’t take the most risk.”
― Crystal Evans, Blood Money: The Scammer and The Ex-slave Owner

“Returning to Jamaica, he had the sense of re-entering a place much less likely to alter in the coming years. Year in, year out, the cane fields produced their riches, the gangs swung their way through them, slaves were brought, seasoned, used up, replaced. Planters would go on making improvements to their great houses, to methods of production, and yes, to the conditions in which their slaves lived and worked, because it was in their interest to do so. But fundamentally the structure of life and of society did not change.”
― James Robertson, Joseph Knight

“Some people misperceived what a hunter or who a hunter is.
Most people associate hunting with Lions chasing Gazelles.
The human hunter sometimes doesn’t go looking for deers.
Hunters sometimes sit in the quiet, shade of a tree, back against a safe firm wall and wait on a catch.
Sometimes your catch comes to you.
Like lounging on a boat on a lake and your fishing rod in the water wakes you up after a fish is hooked on it and starts moving.
Hunting isn’t always moving.
Sometimes a man or woman hunts by not doing anything.
Nothing.
And you find yourself hooked.
I’ve decided to stop falling into those toxic traps.
Hunters aren’t always in motion.”
― Crystal Evans, The Fairy Tale Complex

“Lifting one loc, he rolled it between his fingers, familiarizing himself with the soft texture. He tugged it a little and let it spring out of his grip.
When he met her gaze, he could have sworn Nasira was holding her breath.

She released it and took another shallow one, closing her eyes. Almost as if she was waiting for a kiss.”
― J.L. Campbell

“When they ask how I weathered the storm, I will tell them I did not. I was uprooted like the palm trees and shot down like the birds from the stormy skies. I was ravished like the zinc houses and devoured like the soil as it swallowed itself whole. I was ruined. I was disaster. I was dancing in the eye of God’s will.
‘Thank you,’ I whisper as we ascend into the sky.

How beautiful it was to be destroyed.”
― Asha Bromfield

“When they ask me how I weathered the storm, I will tell them I did not. I was ravished like the zinc houses and devoured like the soil as it swallowed itself whole. I was ruined. I was disaster. I was dancing in the eye of God’s will.
‘Thank you,’ I whisper as we ascend into the sky.

How beautiful it was to be destroyed.”
― Asha Ashanti Bromfield, Hurricane Summer

“The issue I have with people who say they love me…
Is that I don’t feel loved by them.

Their love often seems more like opportunism to me or masked usery.
Am not saying this man don’t love me or rate me.

I don’t feel that love.
I don’t feel loved by him…

I am not saying a family member don’t love me or isn’t a good person or hasn’t been good to me…
I am just saying that this person they project or profess to be…
Is someone I have never experienced…

Yes you are this great person to other people…
The thing is…
I don’t know that person.
I’ve never experienced that person and those I reserve the right to feel the way I feel about you as a person and this experience…

It also can’t be love if standing up for myself makes you hate me.
Love would have led to empathy and not feelings of umbrage.

“You know I love you”
You can say I love you.
But I don’t feel loved by you…
Your love means nothing to me if I don’t feel or experience it.


Selah.”
― Crystal Evans

“If you want to know how much your past decisions don’t align with your ambitions? Pursue your ambitions relentlessly, tunnel vision focus and watch how your mistakes and past stands in your way. Everything eventually adds up.”
― Crystal Evans, The Country Gyal Journal

“Men don’t grow up. The amount of compromise and emotional labor required to deal with them becomes increasingly difficult with age. So most of your friends who are getting married now will be getting divorced by the time you’re my age because they settled before they knew enough to want more for themselves. Fuckboys are terrible. But....Good guys will be worse. They will expect extra credit for being minimally decent. Asserting standards of reciprocity is the perpetual struggle. Be prepared to compromise A LOT...often with no reward. OR be prepared to learn to be content by yourself A LOT. There is no in between. any woman who tells you different is lying to herself and you.”
― Crystal Evans, Tall Dark and Bad : Extended Edition

“I take a very long time to let go of a man.
Why?
Because I am one of those types that lead by my ego and not my heart.
I don’t think women lead by their hearts.
I think they make decisions whether to stay or leave based on ego.

Women have bigger egos than men.
Women don’t leave men because of heart break. They leave men when their egos are bruised. When he does something that shatters her pride and make her feel exposed… like she feel like it’s apparent and everybody know he doesn’t rate or love her.

It’s the same reason why a man will cheat and a woman stays with him once he makes it clear that her position has not been altered or usurped. Same goes for having an outside kid.

He kept her ego in tact.
She will ride on that ego until she is so ashamed of his behavior.
Until she finds his actions so reducing and minimizing.

Then her pride won’t allow her to stay… with him anymore.”
― Crystal Evans, 100 Dating Tips for Jamaican Women

“I've tried to hold space for change... even that for me felt like i was forcing, forcing myself to accept something I wasn't comfortable with. Love makes us act strange..and excitement can feel like pressure and passion can feel like obsession..so best to just sit back calmly..and let them do what they need to do. Then i forced myself to eventually to do the same.”
― Crystal Evans, The Bunna Man Trilogy

“With regards to social media…
At some point this becomes a conversation i am having with myself, isolated yet frustrated but accepting that i will never be able to connect with most people on anything but on a superficial level.
Thats my only closure.”
― Crystal Evans, 100 Dating Tips for Jamaican Women

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet”
― Vilma Ruddock, Jamaican Genealogy Research: A Practical Guide to the Best Resources for Tracing Your Ancestry

“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

“People so poor they can't even afford shame.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“The odds are never in my favour and that’s my source code. I used to say cheat code. But not anymore.”
― Crystal Evans, The Country Gyal Journal

“She says she can finally breathe now. She feels freed by the privilege of relative racelessness. In 2009, Kingston's murder rate reached the highest ever on record, and my mom returned there so she could finally feel safe.”
― Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You

“The most important interracial relationship I have is with myself. I move through the landscape a double agent, where I listen and learn.”
― Michelle Cliff, If I Could Write This in Fire