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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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594062e
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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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9ad37b1
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Do others have to lose so we can win?
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Zadie Smith |
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95b2937
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And so if we want to see real change in this world, she continued, adjusting the incline on her running machine until I, who walked on a neighboring one, seemed to be watching her dash up the side of Kilimanjaro, well, then we ourselves have to be the ones to do it, yes, we have to be the change we want to see. By "we" she meant people like herself, of financial means and global reach, who happen to love freedom and equality, want justice, ..
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Zadie Smith |
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bcaaa55
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As the departing president well understood, in this world there is only incremental progress. Only the willfully blind can ignore that the history of human existence is simultaneously the history of pain: of brutality, murder, mass extinction, every form of venality and cyclical horror. No land is free of it; no people are without their bloodstain; no tribe entirely innocent. But there is still this redeeming matter of incremental progress...
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Zadie Smith |
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19d0334
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A referendum magnifies the worst aspects of an already imperfect system--democracy--channeling a dazzlingly wide variety of issues through a very narrow gate. It has
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Zadie Smith |
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808bfbf
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Everyone in both Natalie's workplace and Frank's was intimately involved with the lives of a group of African-Americans, mostly male, who slung twenty-dollar vials of crack in the scrub between a concatenation of terribly designed tower blocks in a depressed and forgotten city with one of the highest murder rates in the United States. That everyone should be so intimately involved in the lives of these young men annoyed Frank, though he cou..
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Zadie Smith |
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ef025c6
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and a bottom which was the Platonic ideal of all English bottomry.
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Zadie Smith |
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6f724ea
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Marcia would love this--sometimes people see visions of her in the churchyard. Marcia's always having visions. Usually of white Madonnas, though, with blond hair and nice blouses from M & S. . . .
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Zadie Smith |
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bf87d2f
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But darling, I am clean. Two years clean." "Cept the coke, weed, drink, pills . . ." "I said I'm clean, not a bloody Mormon!"
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Zadie Smith |
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65e56fe
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It's so weird watching rappers becoming elder statesmen. "I'm out for presidents to represent me." Well, now they do--and not only on dollar bills. Heavy responsibility lands on the shoulders of these unacknowledged legislators whose poetry is only, after all, four decades young. Jay-Z's ready for it. He has his admirable Shawn Carter Scholarship Foundation, putting disadvantaged kids through college. He's spoken in support of gay rights. H..
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Zadie Smith |
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9197a7e
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mainly that it was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case.
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Zadie Smith |
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31d138a
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from the people you no longer love.
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Zadie Smith |
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a7a4249
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In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won't matter any more because they can't because they mustn't because they're too long and they're too tortuous and they're just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it.
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multiculturality
optimism
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Zadie Smith |
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af190fc
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I couldn't help but notice the placidity of a small female household. In Tracey's home, disappointment in the man was ancient history: they never really had any hope in him, for he had almost never been at home.
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single-motherhood
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Zadie Smith |
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35c7808
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I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I'M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND--ARCHIE--AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (3.81)
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racial-profiling
white-teeth
zadie-smith
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Zadie Smith |
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657abcb
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Archie's marriage felt like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home and finding they don't fit. For the sake of appearances, he put up with them
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Zadie Smith |
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b1d3beb
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And in the past, Archie wondered, was it just that fewer people cheated? Were they more honest, and did they leave their front doors open, did they leave their kids with the neighbors, pay social calls, run up tabs with the butcher? The funny thing about getting old in a country is people always want to hear that from you. They want to hear it really was once a green and pleasant land. They need it. Archie wondered if his daughter needed it..
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Zadie Smith |
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ba36c83
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In Archie's experience anything with a long memory holds a grievance and a pet with a grievance (that time you got the wrong food, that time you bathed me) just isn't what you want.
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Zadie Smith |
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9aab4ee
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England is not warmer than New England in July or August, that's true. Probably not in June either. But it is warmer in October, November, December, January, February, March, April and May - that is, in every month when warmth matters.
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Zadie Smith |
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7783740
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Poor Zora - she lived through footnotes.
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footnotes
introvert
missing-out
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Zadie Smith |
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02760b7
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In the university prospectus, an italic script over a picture of the Firth of Forth: Philosophy is learning how to die. Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be.
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Zadie Smith |
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0377230
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People like us, we can't be nostalgic. We've no home in the past. Nostalgia is a luxury.
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Zadie Smith |
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de1b71e
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IT'S NOT FAIR! I CAN'T GO ON HAJJ. I'VE GOT TO GO TO SCHOOL. I DON'T HAVE TIME TO GO TO MECCA. IT'S NOT FAIR! "Welcome to the twentieth century. It's not fair. It's never fair." --
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Zadie Smith |
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776bfde
|
What I have realized, is that the generations,' Samad continued as they sped through miles and miles of unchanging flatlands, 'they speak to each other, Jones. It's not a line, Life is not a line -- this is not palm-reading -- it's a circle, and they speak to us. That is why you cannot read fate; you must experience it.
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Zadie Smith |