|
4986548
|
I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
641cdbd
|
Then they had gone outside, onto the steps, where a breeze lifted secondhand confetti
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
8fa7237
|
Sometimes I wonder if people don't want freedom as much as they want meaning,
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
edaf0d4
|
Maybe nothing that happens upon stolen ground can expect a happy ending.
|
|
zadie-smith
|
Zadie Smith |
|
1d7e6ac
|
The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
8614f1d
|
things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth. Our
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
68d58f7
|
Those are my bougainvillea--I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive. But Right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing.
|
|
survival
|
Zadie Smith |
|
559a908
|
She could not do distress. Anger was so much easier. And quicker and harder and better. If I start crying, I'll never stop -you hear people say that; Kiki heard people say it all the time in the hospital. A backlog of sadness for which there would never be sufficient time
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
db4b7d0
|
The story was the price you paid for the rhythm.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
d1c5917
|
But first the endgames. Because it seems that no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
930a618
|
Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean." "Another"
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
31fd52f
|
not long ago I sat down to dinner with an American woman who told me how disappointed she had been to finally read Middlemarch and find that it was "Just this long, whiny, trawling search for a man!" Those who read Middlemarch in that way will find little in Their Eyes Were Watching God to please them. It's about a girl who takes some time to find the man she really loves. It is about the discovery of self in and through another. It implies..
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
031ecc2
|
Nobody can cast themselves out.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
2a89ea4
|
It starts innocently. Casually. You turn up at the annual spring fair full of beans, help with the raffle tickets (because the pretty red-haired music teacher asks you to) and win a bottle of whiskey (all school raffles are fixed), and, before you know where you are, you're turning up at the weekly school council meetings, organizing concerts, discussing plans for a new music department, donating funds for the rejuvenation of the water foun..
|
|
pta
involvement
school
|
Zadie Smith |
|
b00a0e4
|
If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made. To Samad, as to the people of Thailand, tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and..
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
708baa5
|
Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends.
|
|
knowing-oneself
human-condition
|
Zadie Smith |
|
189a1dd
|
Silence. Ah (...) Isn't that something? Did you know this is how other families are? They're quiet. Ask one of these people sitting here. They'll tell you. They've got famillies. This is how some families are all the time. And some people like to call these families repressed, or emotionally stunted or whatever, but do you know what I say? (...) I say, lucky fuckers. Lucky, lucky fuckers. (...) What a peaceful existence. What a joy their li..
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
ac0078a
|
to put it in the modern parlance, this is a re-run. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms spewed out to the old colonies in one tedious, eternal loop. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - something to do with that experience of moving West to East or East to West or island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going b..
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
167c382
|
Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does mean,' said Samad tersely, 'that it is a good idea.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
a3ae558
|
But dying is no easy trick. And suicide can't be put on a list of Things To Do in between cleaning the grill pan and leveling the sofa leg with a brick. It is the decision not to do, to un-do; a kiss blown at oblivion. No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It is for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men.
|
|
suicide
|
Zadie Smith |
|
29206c5
|
Most e-mails sent in the mid-nineties tended to be long and letter-like: they began and ended with traditional greetings--the ones we'd all previously used on paper--and they were keen to describe the surrounding scene, as if the new medium had made of everybody a writer. ("I'm typing this just by the window, looking out to blue-gray sea, where three gulls are diving into the water.")"
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
21b40fa
|
The thing I feared was no longer my parents' authority over me but that they might haul out into the open their own intimate fears, their melancholy and regrets.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
e8859ed
|
And drunk men take dares like they take breaths.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
4ac636d
|
Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
8df1f19
|
While he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie. Somewhere, somehow, by somebody it had been decided that he would live.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
b27538d
|
We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
a08082a
|
It's a question of what love gives you the right to do.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
f3daf4b
|
But it's hard, when you're at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others,
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
499e874
|
There's never any knowing--how am I to put it?--which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever. --E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
b0ae8c5
|
Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bombs fall on television, from listening to stifled sobs from the other end of a telephone line. Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinema verite, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic s..
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
1b6ff61
|
Well, you can't make old friends.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
cfbf070
|
Yes, sometimes it's the strangers that sustain you.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
34a5be4
|
It was a journalist (it was always journalists these days), and she had something to read to him. She'd had a crash course in media relations since her exams, and dealing with them/it had taught her there was no point in trying to deal with each one separately. To give some unique point of view to the Financial Times and then to the Mirror and then to the Daily Mail was impossible. It was their job, not yours, to get the angle, to write the..
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
82bcc12
|
the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
dbb617d
|
When everyone's building a fence, isn't it a true fool who lives out in the open?
|
|
politics
community
|
Zadie Smith |
|
2d62749
|
A peculiar idea. Once you're alive in this world, you're responsible." "For"
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
498477f
|
And then she reverses direction and heads straight for Willesden Bookshop, an independent shop that rents space from the council and provides--no matter what Brent Council may claim--an essential local service. It is run by Helen. Helen is an essential local person. I would characterize her essentialness in the following way: 'Giving the people what they didn't know they wanted.' Important category.
|
|
independent-booksellers
bookstores
|
Zadie Smith |
|
d9e45ac
|
I don't mean that my mother didn't love me but she was not a domestic person: her life was in her mind. The fundamental skill of all mothers--the management
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
b8fb3f8
|
How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably?
|
|
hate
love
|
Zadie Smith |
|
af29c06
|
He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is "color-blind," by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color--to look past it--to the "you" beneath. Not content with colonizing your country, he now colonizes your self"
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
74d2ccf
|
When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
cc4197f
|
Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
8c3dfae
|
Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one.
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |
|
79bf32f
|
oh, he loves her; just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly)
|
|
|
Zadie Smith |