I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.
Interpretation
The pursuit of truth is more important than the pursuit of happiness.
In this quote, Jamaica Kincaid emphasizes that life is inherently challenging and that the search for happiness or positivity may distract from a deeper understanding of reality. Rather than focusing on attaining joy, she advocates for embracing the truth of life's difficulties, even if that truth might not lead to happiness.
In practice
In a lecture about life challenges, this quote can illustrate the importance of truth over temporary happiness.
Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.
Gardeners (or just plain simple writers who write about the garden) always have something they like intensely and in particular, right at the moment you engage them in the reality of the borders they cultivate, the space in the garden they occupy at any moment, they like in particular this, or they like in particular that.
I read about writers who have routines. They write at certain times of the day. I can't do that. I am always writing-but in my head.
I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.
I didn't think of myself as an outsider because of my race because... where I grew up I was the same race as almost everyone else... It is true that I noticed things that no one else seemed to notice. And I think only people who are outsiders do this.
I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.
There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.
A person's faith can collapse almost overnight if she failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.
The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them.
Sometimes immense things, like war and death and aging, are best seen from the corner of the eye and written of only obliquely, with tremendous lightness.
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
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