Jamaica Kincaid People Quotations

People only say I'm angry because I'm black and I'm a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do.

You know how some people write every day at a certain point? I'm not like that. I carry something around for a long time. I weigh the words and the sentences. I weigh the paragraphs. The process is much more meditative for me.

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

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."

"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.

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.

On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.

Time is the element that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people.

I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess.

In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other. And the important thing isn't whether I'm angry. The more important thing is, is it true? Do these things really happen?

when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble.

The slave trade was globalism. Why people insist that globalism, after its hideous history, is a good thing, I do not know.

I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.

I didn't think of myself as an outsider because of my race because... where I grew up I was the same race as almost everyone else... It is true that I noticed things that no one else seemed to notice. And I think only people who are outsiders do this.

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

Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.

Another thing I like to say to my students is this: "How many Corinthians read Paul's letters?" The answer is none. They couldn't have cared less! There aren't even any Corinthians left, but Paul's letters persist. Paul was not a professional writer. He was called to something, and he sent his letters. That's a good way to look at it. That you might be making something that nobody cares about, but you have to do it. It's not that people should care, but that you should care.

People only say I’m angry because I’m black and I’m a woman.

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.

People don't make changes because things are wonderful.

I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.

One day I was living silently in a personal hell, without anyone to tell what I felt, without even knowing that the feelings I had were possible to have; and then one day I was not living like that at all. I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be and things you used to do. Your past is the person you no longer are, the situations you are no longer in.