Jamaica Kincaid

The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being.

Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.

they should never have left their home, their precious England, a place they loved so much, a place they had to leave but could never forget. And so everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned English.

The English hate each other and they hate England, and the reason they are so miserable now is that they have no place else to go and nobody else to feel better than.)

But when my eyes rested on my mother, I found her beautiful.

No small part of my life was so unimportant that she hadn’t made a note of it, and now she would tell it to me over and over again.

How terrible it must be for all the people who had no one to love them so and no one whom they loved so

loved him so and wished that I had a mother to give him, for, no matter how much my own mother loved him, it could never be the same.

It was in such a paradise that I lived.

That the day might actually come when we would live apart I had never believed.