Quote

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

Jamaica Kincaid

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jamaica Kincaid
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 25
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
St John's
Elanie Potter Richardson
Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson
Way
Justice
Write
Two
Human
Humans
Organize
Different
Injustice
Writing
Beings
Really
Ways

More quotes by Jamaica Kincaid

Image
Here I am, a product of something really vicious, product of the Atlantic slave trade. And yet, I give nary a thought to some of the awful things happening right now in the world.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I was just looking at moving to Cambridge, and a house I was looking at cost a million dollars. Because somehow, that's what a house costs. And I was thinking, How can it be? And I was thinking, What am I doing? Am I going to be Niall Ferguson, that horrible man?
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
That the world I was in could be soft, lovely, and nourishing was more than I could bear, and so I stood there and wept, for I didn't want to love one more thing in my life, didn't want one more thing that could make my heart break into a million little pieces at my feet.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life,from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
I'm so used to being misunderstood.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
What I don't write is as important as what I write.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
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
Image
Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
A piece of cloth that is called linen has more validity than calling you and me black or negro. Cotton has more validity as cotton than yours and my being black.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her.
Jamaica Kincaid
Image
There's a difference between bravery and rash stupidity.
Jamaica Kincaid