|
e780b14
|
Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 0627 hours on January 1, 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate facedown on the steering wheel, hoping judgement would not be too heavy upon him.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
c7af0f1
|
But i cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the *truth*. I have to worry about the truth that can be *lived with*.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
e8a4802
|
We're all black, and we all love to be black, and we all sing from our own hymn sheet. We're all surely black people, but we may be finally approaching a point of human history where you can't talk up or down to us anymore, but only to us. He's talking down to white people--how curious it sounds the other way round! In order to say such a thing, one would have to think collectively of white people, as a people of one mind who speak with one..
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
c75e762
|
In England, we once had an insulting name for such people: trimmers. In the mid-1600s, a trimmer was any politician who attempted to straddle the reviled middle ground between Cavalier and Roundhead, Parliament and the Crown; to call a man a trimmer was to accuse him of being insufficiently committed to an ideology.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
23d5ea2
|
An emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy--if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty. It's not a very civilized emotion.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
d565b81
|
A mortifying sense of porousness.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
4419c5a
|
That is a common mistake. The truth does not depend on what you read.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
2f0fb7e
|
I'm as liberal as the next person', complained Alsana, once they were alone. 'But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
b0c8475
|
He had an absolute empathy for everybody, Magid. And it was an unbelievable pain in the arse.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
02ec54a
|
He peered down the hallway at the shadowy form of Joyce through the glass and scratched his testicles, sadly.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
e354a8c
|
Clarence, look see! It de young prince in white. 'Im come to play domino. I jus' look in his eye and I and I knew 'im play domino. 'Im an hexpert.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
557a098
|
A tap runs fast the first time you switch it on.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
a5eeb69
|
Was it wrong to hope to be happy?
|
|
hope
|
Zadie Smith |
|
1a8b8f9
|
Always the fear of consequences. Always this terrible inertia. What he was about to do to his father was so huge, so colossal, that the consequences were inconceivable - he couldn't imagine a moment occurring after that act. Only blankness. Nothingness. Something like the end of the world. And facing the end of the world, or even just the end of the year, had always given Josh a strangely detached feeling.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
f30e2dd
|
Millat was half sure that he was possibly maybe going to do something or not that would be correct and very silly and fine and un-good.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
96fc8a5
|
There's always somebody who wants to be the Big Man, and take everything for themselves, and tell everybody how to think and what to do. When, actually, it's he who is weak. But if the Big Men see that see that are weak they have no choice but to destroy you. That is the real tragedy.
|
|
power
|
Zadie Smith |
|
6c710bc
|
Prove to me that you are right. Prove to me that you are more right than God. Nothing on earth would do it. Because Ryan didn't believe in or care about anything on earth.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
2443c4e
|
It's great to just be here with you, watching the world go by.
|
|
love
together
|
Zadie Smith |
|
bdb65dc
|
Only as an adult did I come to truly admire [my mother]...for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
04650ca
|
I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end--we are not our parents and they are not us--my father's children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years...whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
6076d24
|
I thought it odd that my father should travel eight miles to Lambert's for comfort when Lambert seemed already to have suffered the kind of abandonment my father feared so badly
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
59b8ccd
|
To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
2af1aff
|
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. When
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
90612b8
|
Back then, we were all still willing to take the "risk," if "risk" is the right word to describe entering into the lives of others, not merely in symbol but in reality."
|
|
socializing
|
Zadie Smith |
|
b4d11ff
|
Maybe a certain kind of ignorance was the condition. Into the pure nothingness of my non-knowledge something sublime (an event?) beyond (beneath?) consciousness was able to occur.
|
|
change-quotes
|
Zadie Smith |
|
3cdfb15
|
In this lengthy riposte, the philosopher informs Paulinus that "learning how to live takes a whole life," and the sense most of us have that our lives are cruelly brief is a specious one: "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it."
|
|
life-and-living
life-quotes
|
Zadie Smith |
|
67ac7bb
|
I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
94c8cac
|
Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity.
|
|
faith
|
Zadie Smith |
|
9fd35ef
|
A feminist who had always been supported by men--first my father and now the Noted Activist--and who, though she continually harangued me about the "nobility of labor," had never, as far as I knew, actually been gainfully employed."
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
1d8a6ba
|
It looks backward, at the past, and it learns from what's gone before. Some people never learn." My" --
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
e021455
|
It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
60edc4a
|
Extreme inequality fractures communities, and after a while the cracks gape so wide the whole edifice comes tumbling down.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
efdf6be
|
Actually creating an animal just so it can die -- it's like being God! I mean personally I'm a Hindu, yeah? I'm not religious or nothing, but you know, I believe in the sanctity of life, yeah? And these people, like, the mouse, plot its every move, yeah, when it's going to have kids, when it's going to die. It's just .
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
1b6301f
|
She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive. That's what her plain white linen trousers were for, her blue-and-white-striped "Breton" T-shirt, her frayed espadrilles, her severe and beautiful African head--everything so plain, so understated, completely out of step with the spirit of the time, and with the place."
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
f6ebc54
|
From where I stood it was a pose that collapsed many periods in her life into one: mother and lover, big sister, best friend, superstar and diplomat, billionaire and street kid, foolish girl and woman of substance.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
4d7853f
|
But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
769780a
|
Crazy enough to start a war. There aren't many people like that. Most of us just follow along once war has been announced.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
0b6130b
|
Once you almost said--to a sneaky fellow from the Daily News, who was inquiring--you almost turned to him and said, Motherfucker, I am music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
248f44e
|
Neither my readers nor I are in the relatively sunlit uplands depicted in White Teeth anymore. But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory, but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and *reimagined* if it is to survive.
|
|
optimism
outlook
politics
progress
white-teeth
|
Zadie Smith |
|
ccdda25
|
Well, we can say that Aimee lives in her bubble," he said, interrupting me, "and so does your friend and, by the way, so do you. It's possible that it's like this for everyone. The size of the bubble is different, this is all. And perhaps the thickness of the--what do you call this in English?--skin--film. The thin layer on a bubble."
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
e19dc8c
|
No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
abc86eb
|
I don't see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don't see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can't afford one." Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly. "Children can be a kind of wealth," he said."
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
3277cc2
|
People are not poor because they've made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they're poor.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
1152eb3
|
Great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They'd met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |