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72fb3bb
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free-form conversations that could eat up whole days.
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Zadie Smith |
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e20f38d
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Now see, with me, said Louie, tiring suddenly of his daughter's talk, with me I didn't need dance school, matter of fact I used to rule the dance floor!
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Zadie Smith |
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14052a4
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They'd met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take. * * *
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Zadie Smith |
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12904ec
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yes, with the mothers she had to make a little more effort, drowning them in language until they understood how out of their depth they were and the thin stream of their objections was completely subsumed by the quick-running currents of my mother's talk.
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Zadie Smith |
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57ecaeb
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She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world's sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything.
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Zadie Smith |
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73c6120
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Yes, you could make something ornamental. That's your freedom! Take it! Who knows? You might be the next Augusta Savage!" I"
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Zadie Smith |
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797b3ea
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There is a mania in the playground for grabbing vaginas.
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Zadie Smith |
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7000da4
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It was like tag, but a girl was never "It," only boys were "It," girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top."
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Zadie Smith |
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081d38e
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Everybody's path crossed with hers at the same moment, as soon as she emerged she was uncontained by space and time, with not one path to cross but all paths--they were all hers, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, all ways were her way--and of course millions of people felt as I did.
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Zadie Smith |
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9678fbf
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Usually when we compliment a dancer we say: she makes it look easy. This is not the case with Aimee. Part of her secret, I felt as I watched her, is the way she's able to summon joy out of effort, for no move of hers flowed instinctively or naturally from the next, each "step" was clearly visible, choreographed, and yet as she sweated away at their execution, the hard work itself felt erotic, it was like witnessing a woman cross the line at..
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Zadie Smith |
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2e9a935
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She accepts everything that has happened to her as her destiny, no more surprised or alienated to be who she is than I imagine Cleopatra was to be Cleopatra. I
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Zadie Smith |
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0eb499b
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when she'd finished she would give one of four possible judgments. "Zippy"--which was good; "Important"--which was very good; "Controversial"--which could be either good or bad, you never knew; or "Lidderary," which was pronounced with a sigh and an eye roll and was very bad."
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Zadie Smith |
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827e2a6
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A superstar takes everybody everywhere. "What"
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Zadie Smith |
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7617136
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can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize?
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Zadie Smith |
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3fa66b2
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Even the simplest ideas I'd brought with me did not seem to work
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Zadie Smith |
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ba582a3
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I didn't know what to do with all of the sadness. A hundred and fifty years! Do you have any idea how long a hundred and fifty years is in the family of man? She clicked her fingers, and I thought of Miss Isabel, counting children in for the beats of a dance. That long, she said.
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Zadie Smith |
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3afc57b
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She held herself apart, always.
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Zadie Smith |
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47e8505
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She noticed the most important thing of all, which is the dance lesson within the performance.
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Zadie Smith |
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64592e0
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It was a tough decision.' Mickey crosses his arms and scoffs, 'No such thing, mate. You're either right or you ain't. And
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Zadie Smith |
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afca835
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Nastoiashchee der'mo (takova byla mantra Mo) - eto golubi, a ne ikh der'mo. Razvod - eto kogda otbiraesh' to, chto tebe bol'she ne nuzhno u tekh, kogo ty bol'she ne liubish'.
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Zadie Smith |
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1660b61
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it's about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don't you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?" He"
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Zadie Smith |
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9a365f3
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but to create a real feeling--made
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Zadie Smith |
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209a8a1
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Together we entered this new space that now opened up between people, a connection with no precise beginning or end, that was always potentially open, and my mother was one of the first people I knew to understand this and exploit it fully.
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Zadie Smith |
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5351877
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The Noted Activist
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Zadie Smith |
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37a250d
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This is what I understood by it: that for Astaire the person in the film was not especially connected with him.
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Zadie Smith |
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2203191
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If these are 'talents' - the ability to sing, or to quickly comprehend and reproduce musical notation - what kind of a thing is 'talent'? A commodity? A gift? A prize? A reward? For what?
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Zadie Smith |
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c5c947b
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because white novelists are not white novelists but simply "novelists," and white characters are not white characters but simply "human," and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the neutral universal, and the black women who have championed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the past, and the one doing so now, will seem like black women talking about a black book."
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Zadie Smith |
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b8f6a61
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What could she know about the waves of time that simply come at a person, one after the other? What could she know about life as the temporary, always partial, survival of that process?
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Zadie Smith |
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e3af614
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A different kind of history from my mother's, the kind that is barely written down--that is felt.
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Zadie Smith |
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3d6d51e
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He wanted to be in the world and take what came with it, endings local and universal, full stops, periods, looks of injured disappointment and the everyday war. He liked the everyday war. He was taking that with fries. To go.
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Zadie Smith |
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d07277a
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If my dad hadn't died young? No way I'd be here. It's the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks--the bloody Irish. That's our secret fucking strength.
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Zadie Smith |
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15a97c9
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On Brexit: "What have they done?" we said to each other, sometimes meaning the leaders, who we felt must have known what they were doing, and sometimes meaning the people, who, we implied, didn't. Now I'm tempted to think it was the other way around. Doing something, anything, was in some inchoate way the aim: the notable feature of neoliberalism is that it feels like you can do nothing to change it, but this vote offered up the rare prize ..
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Zadie Smith |
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4d62af4
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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..
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Zadie Smith |
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e8a4802
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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..
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Zadie Smith |
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c75e762
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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.
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Zadie Smith |
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23d5ea2
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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.
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Zadie Smith |
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d565b81
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A mortifying sense of porousness.
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Zadie Smith |
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4419c5a
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That is a common mistake. The truth does not depend on what you read.
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Zadie Smith |
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2f0fb7e
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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.
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Zadie Smith |
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b0c8475
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He had an absolute empathy for everybody, Magid. And it was an unbelievable pain in the arse.
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Zadie Smith |
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02ec54a
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He peered down the hallway at the shadowy form of Joyce through the glass and scratched his testicles, sadly.
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Zadie Smith |
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e354a8c
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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.
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Zadie Smith |
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557a098
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A tap runs fast the first time you switch it on.
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Zadie Smith |
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a5eeb69
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Was it wrong to hope to be happy?
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hope
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Zadie Smith |