|
bd9e5fe
|
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
099e099
|
You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
3635879
|
It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, "Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't with love. He was too fucked up to know to love me." Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lack..
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
7bd734c
|
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
82ba445
|
Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful...and decide what you want and need and must do. It's a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the..
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
fa74a55
|
Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was ..
|
|
feminism
women
body-image
|
Zadie Smith |
|
39b5df1
|
If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
ef57c4c
|
You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
537a61e
|
Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
0678747
|
Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
ba7d875
|
You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
cf308f3
|
Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
9956751
|
People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel -- before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from cha..
|
|
love
siblings
|
Zadie Smith |
|
3767c02
|
They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
25173d0
|
the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
28b7418
|
She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
8a53cdf
|
In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
|
|
truth
solution
|
Zadie Smith |
|
b5cc956
|
Our children will be born of our actions. . Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddah, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his br..
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
622bcf6
|
They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
|
|
siblings
|
Zadie Smith |
|
ae97682
|
Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
308d51c
|
But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry,
|
|
white-teeth
zadie-smith
immigrants
|
Zadie Smith |
|
c7ccf49
|
I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
8588ab8
|
Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
a05c03e
|
This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
ef6b138
|
I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
b2c5b61
|
The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
909ddfc
|
Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
ecd8c29
|
These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally ..
|
|
tolerance
immigration
|
Zadie Smith |
|
c736d77
|
don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinema verite, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
344b308
|
I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
8d8871b
|
Do me this one, great favor, Jones. If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home...if ever you hear anyone speak of the East," and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, " . If you are told 'they are all this' or 'they do this' or 'their opinions are these,' withhold your judgment until all the facts are upon you. Because that land they call 'India' goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and i..
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
38595b3
|
This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?
|
|
holidays
|
Zadie Smith |
|
22e9bb4
|
Where I come from," said Archie, "a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her." "Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean," said Samad tersely, "that it is a good idea."
|
|
multiculturalism
|
Zadie Smith |
|
452366a
|
No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because is one of the magical fantasy words like and and that have now passed into language.
|
|
imaginary-things
immigrants
immigration
|
Zadie Smith |
|
64af830
|
He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
9f3f924
|
She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
a1aa098
|
She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.
|
|
girls
fashion
|
Zadie Smith |
|
e7a522f
|
It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
424a956
|
a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end? (b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split? (c) Is there a chance (and please check the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason? Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a ha..
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
86c83d9
|
She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn't time for anything else.
|
|
time
|
Zadie Smith |
|
dfcb44b
|
Full stories are as rare as honesty.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
1e82650
|
Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison.
|
|
happiness
|
Zadie Smith |
|
b442116
|
For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
91aeed3
|
A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |