Looking at the horizon again, I saw a lone figure coming toward me, but I wasn’t frightened because I was sure it was my mother. As I got closer to the figure, I could see that it wasn’t my mother, but still I wasn’t frightened because I could see that it was a woman.

— Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.

— Jamaica Kincaid

What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.

— Jamaica Kincaid

If I describe a person’s physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is “black” or “white.” I may describe the color of their skin – black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I’m not talking about race.

— Jamaica Kincaid

Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say “Oh, she’s so angry.” If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes “Oh, she’s autobiographical.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn’t know that it was possible.

— Jamaica Kincaid

It’s too easy to say this or that is “race,” and that has been a vehicle for an incredible amount of wrong in the world.

— Jamaica Kincaid

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as “black,” were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

— Jamaica Kincaid

Love and hatred don’t take turns; they exist side by side at the same time. And one’s duty, one’s obligation every day, is to choose to follow the nobler one.

— Jamaica Kincaid

Life has a truth to it, and it’s complicated – it’s love and it’s hatred.

— Jamaica Kincaid

The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.

— Jamaica Kincaid

Romance

A psychiatrist once asked me to draw a picture of my family. This is when I was a member of a family of four. I drew the three other people in the family first, bodies and heads. And then, last, I began to draw myself – but gave up.

— Jamaica Kincaid

I’ve written a book about my mother, and I don’t remember anyone going to Antigua or calling up my mother and verifying her life. There is something about this book that drives people mad with the autobiographical question.

— Jamaica Kincaid

Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in – and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it.

— Jamaica Kincaid

I wouldn’t mind being labeled as “angry,” if it wasn’t used once again to denigrate and belittle.

— Jamaica Kincaid

I don’t feel I’m angry. I feel as though I’m describing something true. If I had stabbed my husband, I could understand being called “angry.” If I had an affair with my husband’s best friend and written about that experience, I could see the anger. But I’m not doing that.

— Jamaica Kincaid

People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you’re writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone’s brown skin.

— Jamaica Kincaid

I’ve come to see that I’m saying something that people generally do not want to hear.

— Jamaica Kincaid

The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

— Jamaica Kincaid

You know how they say a man’s house is his castle? I think for a woman, it’s her body. I feel so strongly about a woman’s right to choose. This is my Zionism. It’s not a “right” any more than it’s a right to breathe, to take in oxygen.

— Jamaica Kincaid

It’s very funny, American society: White culture can do all sorts of things and get away with it, but the minute a black person does it, it’s interpreted in some way.

— Jamaica Kincaid

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