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1a8b8f9
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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.
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Zadie Smith |
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f30e2dd
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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.
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Zadie Smith |
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96fc8a5
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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.
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power
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Zadie Smith |
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6c710bc
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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.
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Zadie Smith |
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2443c4e
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It's great to just be here with you, watching the world go by.
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love
together
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Zadie Smith |
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bdb65dc
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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
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Zadie Smith |
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04650ca
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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
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Zadie Smith |
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6076d24
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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
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Zadie Smith |
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59b8ccd
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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.
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Zadie Smith |
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90612b8
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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."
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socializing
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Zadie Smith |
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b4d11ff
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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.
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change-quotes
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Zadie Smith |
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3cdfb15
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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."
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life-and-living
life-quotes
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Zadie Smith |
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67ac7bb
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I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it.
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Zadie Smith |
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94c8cac
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Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity.
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faith
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Zadie Smith |
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470c2f8
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Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.
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Zadie Smith |
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5eaf847
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Marilyn Monroe was pretty far along that curve, as close as one can come to dancing while still walking. In her classic 1953 movie Niagara she takes a legendary walk away from the camera, hips swinging--roiling--in a mode long since memorialized by catwalk models, drag queens, prima donnas, freaks and queers, street punks of all persuasions.
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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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3500908
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They were married though they needn't have married, and though both had sworn they never would be. It is hard to explain--in that game of musical chairs--why they should have stopped, finally, at each other. Kindness, as a quality, had something to do with it. Many things were easy to find on those dance floors, but kindness was rare. Her husband was kinder than any man Leah Hanwell had ever known, aside from her father. And then of course ..
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Zadie Smith |
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236ab52
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I am a citizen as well as an individual soul and one of the things citizenship teaches us, over the long stretch, is that there is no perfectibility in human affairs.
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Zadie Smith |
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97d4d0d
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He didn't get depressed, but he managed this not by looking away but by looking closely, attending to each logical step in any particular problem, so that the problem itself filled all available mental space.
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Zadie Smith |
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e780b14
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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.
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Zadie Smith |
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c7af0f1
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But i cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the *truth*. I have to worry about the truth that can be *lived with*.
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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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optimism
multiculturality
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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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white-teeth
zadie-smith
racial-profiling
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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
|
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
missing-out
introvert
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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
|
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 |