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09b1f69
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My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own.
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Zadie Smith |
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9c164d3
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You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.
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gesture
dying
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Zadie Smith |
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d359117
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Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting.
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Zadie Smith |
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d0221c0
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Maybe every author needs to keep faith with Nabokov, and every reader with Barthes. For how can you write, believing in Barthes? Still, I'm glad I'm not the reader I was in college anymore, and I'll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I wanted to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader--the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate me..
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Zadie Smith |
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8ebf033
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He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire, the kind of talking that only increases it.
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Zadie Smith |
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1dbf8a3
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Between propriety and joy choose joy.
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Zadie Smith |
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9352394
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There are two different kinds of glee club in this world. The first sing barbershop favourites and Gershwin tunes, they swing gently, moving from side to side and sometimes clicking their fingers and winking. Howard could basically deal with that type. He had got through those occasions graced by glee clubs of that type. But these boys were not of that type. Swaying and clicking and winking were just how they got warmed up. Tonight this gle..
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Zadie Smith |
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f3fb1c2
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Life was an enormous rucksack so impossibly heavy that, even though it meant losing everything, it was infinitely easier to leave all baggage here on the roadside and walk into the blackness.
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Zadie Smith |
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8a4c0b8
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If novelists know anything it's that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting.
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Zadie Smith |
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8a82eeb
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For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood.
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Zadie Smith |
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79c7e98
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She wanted to read things -- could not resist wanting to read things -- and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexive habits baffled the girl, for she knew herself to be fantastically stupid about many things. Wasn't it possible that what others mistook as intelligence might in fact be only a sort of mutation of the will? She could sit in one place longer th..
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Zadie Smith |
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9ff8302
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He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people's jobs; or had no job and bummed off the state; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped elephants and wore turb..
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prejudice
judgment
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Zadie Smith |
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49d0095
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Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.
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family
life
love
repel
urgency
daughters
mothers
generations
mothers-and-daughters
london
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Zadie Smith |
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cc2a7e6
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Ahhh, now, you see, we've been through this, and my thought is this: there's no smoke without fire," Archie would say, looking impressed by the wisdom of his own conclusion. "Know what I mean?" This was one of Archie's preferred analytic tools when confronted with news stories, historical events, and the tricky day-to-day process of separating fact from fiction. There's no smoke without fire. There was something so vulnerable in the way he ..
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Zadie Smith |
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a7cb0d5
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In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship and Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.
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Zadie Smith |
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2faeafd
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That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.
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rare
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Zadie Smith |
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6312d23
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White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.
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Zadie Smith |
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71cace5
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progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.
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Zadie Smith |
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9aed557
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I wanted to love and to be loved.
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Zadie Smith |
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5f4b2da
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They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up.
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Zadie Smith |
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9fe4e09
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Cos if it's encyclopedias we've got enough, like, information... and if it's God, you've got the wrong house.
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god
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Zadie Smith |
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e0a0207
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I was fourteen: the world was pain.
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Zadie Smith |
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d2667dd
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One of the many things TV does not show you is the potential range and horror of the human form. For this alone, thought Alex, it is rightly celebrated.
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Zadie Smith |
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026b27e
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The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics.
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Zadie Smith |
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7a1037f
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at any time of the day, corduroy is a highly stressful fabric. Rent collectors wear it. Tax collectors, too. History teachers add leather elbow patches.
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Zadie Smith |
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b9d72e1
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American houses...' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?
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history
zadie-smith
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Zadie Smith |
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29dca27
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People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two lovers, 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 opinion 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 chairs ..
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Zadie Smith |
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59c4e76
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The window logs Kilburn's skyline. Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never come here. Here bust is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-streaked sidings rising and falling like a rickety roller coaster. Higgledy-piggledy rooftops and chimneys, some high, some low, packed tightly, shaken fags in a box. Behind the opposite window, retreating Willesden. Number 37. In the 1880s or thereabouts the whole thing went up at..
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london
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Zadie Smith |
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0703d11
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Once they were the same age. Now Leah is aging in dog years. Her thirty-five is seven times his, and seven times more important, so important he has to keep reminding her of the numbers, in case she forgets.
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Zadie Smith |
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86539fc
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The planet is finished with us, at this point -
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science
truth
planet
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Zadie Smith |
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45d3d42
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It's just the problem with those things, and what i've learnt is this: they're meant to be a shortcut to the ultimate... thing, the plane, or whatever you want to say it like, yeah? It's meant to be: here's your thirty quid or whatever, take me to higher consciousness, please. And it don't work that way, bro. You don't get the full benefit. You've got to work your way up that tree, meaning that that is an allegory which is saying: you can't..
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Zadie Smith |
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e371bfe
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We did not desire or dread the boys in themselves, we only desired and dreaded being wanted or not being wanted.
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Zadie Smith |
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28dc905
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My rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done.
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Zadie Smith |
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c27307d
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Leah watches Natalie stride over to her beautiful kitchen with her beautiful child. Everything behind those French doors is full and meaningful. The gestures, the glances, the conversations that can't be heard. How do you get to be so full? And so full of only meaningful things?
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Zadie Smith |
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7230056
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Did you know this is how other families are?...What a peaceful existence. What a joy their lives must be. They open a door and all they've got behind it is a bathroom or living room. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody's old historical shit all over the place. They're not constantly making the same old mistakes. They're not always hearing the same..
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Zadie Smith |
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b5c4a5a
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And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems some long, dirty lie... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
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Zadie Smith |
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c3e56ea
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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
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Zadie Smith |
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6ae11ab
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Thirty years - almost all of them really happy. That's a lifetime, it's incredible. Most people don't get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it's over...
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Zadie Smith |
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dff0657
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But as the prey evolves (and we are prey to the Mad who are pursuing us, desperate to impart their own brand of truth to the hapless commuter) so does the hunter, and the true professionals begin to tire of that old catchphrase "What you looking at?" begin to tire of that old catchphrase "What you looking at?" and move into more exotic territory. Take Mad Mary. Oh, the principle's still the same, it's still all about eye contact and the dan..
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Zadie Smith |
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a614653
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Travel had seemed the key to the kingdom, back then. One dreamed of a life that would enable travel. Howard looked through his window at a lamp-post buried to its waist in show supporting two chained-up, frozen bikes, identifiable only by the tips of their handlebars. He imagined waking up this morning and digging his bike out of the snow and riding to a proper job, the kind Belseys had had for generations, and found he couldn't imagine it...
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Zadie Smith |
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f6de10c
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Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before.
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Zadie Smith |
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051634b
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We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be.
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Zadie Smith |
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d943731
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But I cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the I have to worry about the truth that can be And that is the difference between losing your marbles drinking the salty sea, or swallowing the stuff from the streams. My Niece-of-Shame believes in the talking cure, eh?" says Alsana, with something of a grin. "Talk, talk, talk and it will be better. Be honest, slice open your heart and spread the red stuff around. But the past is mad..
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sanity
future
honesty
past
truth
pregnancy
relativism
worrying
talking
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Zadie Smith |
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6dfdb33
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The golden age of Luncheon Vouchers ended ten years ago. For ten years Mickey had been saying, "The golden age of Luncheon Vouchers is over." And that's what Archie loved about O'Connell's. Everything was remembered, nothing was lost. History was never revised or reinterpreted, adapted or whitewashed. It was as solid and as simple as the encrusted egg on the clock."
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Zadie Smith |