Jamaica Kincaid Quotes

“Race.” I really can’t understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both “black” and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can’t take them seriously. Not beyond the fact that they have the ability to say that you and I are a single race. You know, 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.”…

You can probably tell from my writing that I’m obsessed with notions of justice and injustice—those things that are wrong that can never be made right.

I didn’t really understand racism because I grew up in an all-black society, so I didn’t see how it was possible not to like me!

Isn’t that the last straw; for not only did we have to suffer the unspeakableness of slavery, but the satisfaction to be had from “We made you bastards rich” is taken away, too.

I’m not going to defend misogyny in hip-hop. But it didn’t affect me the way, say, Hustler magazine did. 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.

His death was imminent and we were all anticipating it, including him, but we never gave any thought to the fact that this was true for all of us, too: our death was imminent, only we were not anticipating it ... yet.”

No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I love.

I don’t like to hear people speaking in my work. I like reading it, and I marvel at people who can do it well. And there’s something when you see it done well. It’s just so terrific. But I’m not able to do it.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

Oh what a morning it was, that first morning of Mrs. Sweet awaking before the baby Heracles with his angry cries, declaring his hunger, the discomfort of his wet diaper, the very aggravation of being new and in the world; the rays of sun were falling on the just and unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, causing the innocent dew to evaporate; the sun, the dew, the little waterfall right next to the village's firehouse, making a roar, though really it was an imitation of the roar of a real waterfall; the smell of some flower, faint, as it unfurled its petals for the first time: oh what a morning!

Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you.

All masters of every stripe are rubbish, all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this...Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.

(Were there black writers you read as a young person?) I didn’t know there were black writers. When I met Derek Walcott, after I had written my first novel, he was so appalled that I had not ever been exposed to a West Indian writer that he sent me an anthology. All the writers in it were men, of course. When I came to America, I did start to read black writers, but they were political writers—Eldridge Cleaver, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). The first book I got from a library in the U.S. was An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, by Gunnar Myrdal. I didn’t understand race in America at all.

It's always amazing to me the people who talk about the superiority of Western civilization—nothing else has done more to destroy the earth!

How soft is the blackness as it falls. It falls in silence and yet it is deafening, for no other sound except the blackness falling can be heard. The blackness falls like soot from a lamp with an untrimmed wick. The blackness is visible and yet it is invisible, for I see that I cannot see it. The blackness fills up a small room, a large field, an island, my own being. The blackness cannot bring me joy but often I am made glad in it.”