Jamaicans Quotes

My formative years, until I was 12, was all shaped by Jamaican culture, by that economy, by the people in my family, who are agriculturalists, who were plantation workers, who harvested those crops and took them down to the boats run by the United Food Company, to load those ships at night, hence all the songs that I sing that come from that environment. ~ Harry Belafonte

I pulled the Johnny character from the Jamaican Johnny Too Bad thing. ~ Robert Cray

My dream of happiness: a quiet spot by the Jamaican seashore ... hearing the wind sob with the beauty and the tragedy of everything. Sitting under an almond tree, with the leaf spread over me like an umbrella. ~ Errol Flynn

I wrote a short article called "Yardcore" for that issue, too, as an attempt to talk about the Jamaican influence on garage, grime and dubstep; as a splicing of soundsystem culture and hardcore. ~ Kode9

Jamaicans are so unflappable, they might as well be Minnesotans. ~ Marlon James

I was the only black girl at my junior high school. I had an afro, a Jamaican accent, I looked really old. ~ Grace Jones

In 'Colonization in Reverse'41 (a famous poem much anthologized) the speaker is presented as a more or less reliable commentator who implies that Jamaicans who come to 'settle in de motherlan' are like English people who settled in the colonies. West Indian entrepreneurs, shipping off their countrymen 'like fire', turn history upside down. Fire can destroy, but may also be a source of warmth to be welcomed in temperate England. Those people who 'immigrate an populate' the seat of the Empire seem, like many a colonizer, ready to displace previous inhabitants. 'Jamaica live fi box bread/Out a English people mout' plays on a fear that newcomers might exploit the natives; and some of the immigrants are - like some of the colonizers from 'the motherland' - lazy and inclined to put on airs. Can England, who faced war and braved the worst, cope with people from the colonies turning history upside down? Can she cope with 'Colonizin in reverse'? ~ Mervyn Morris

My favorite healthy foods are Jamaican chicken soup, Jamaican chicken stew peas, Jamaican brown stew chicken, plantains and banana chips. ~ Sanya Richards-Ross

My favorite herb - lamb's bread. Kali. I like Hawaiian. But for some reason, you communicate better with Jamaican herb. The best Jamaican herb, it have more energy, more everything to it. ~ Bob Marley

You know, rap is sort of like a form of talking, right? So it's like you can hear, you know, the slaves doing it. You can hear, like, you know, Africans and Jamaicans doing it just kind of as, like, a rhythmic, poetic conversation, you know, to a rhythm. ~ Nas

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off. ~ John Henrik Clarke

My dad is Greek and my mum Jamaican. My grandparents brought me up for most of my childhood, but I saw my mum and dad all the time. ~ Lianne La Havas

I'm an artist. And I'm happy that I was there at the commencement of this music, this Jamaican music, to put my contribution and help to establish it. ~ Jimmy Cliff