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e3cacac
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Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinema verite, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
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Zadie Smith |
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554c194
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It is the most ridiculous country in the world, Bangladesh. It is God's idea of a really good wheeze, his stab at black comedy.
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Zadie Smith |
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d96e4ce
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When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgement. 'Whatever,
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Zadie Smith |
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be91f67
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It was the season of sex, yes, but it was also, in all the vital ways, without sex itself--and isn't that one useful definition of a happy girlhood? I didn't know or appreciate this aspect of my luck until well into adulthood, when I began to find, in more cases than I would have guessed, that among my women friends, irrespective of background, their own childhood sex seasons had been exploited and destroyed by the misdeeds of uncles and fa..
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Zadie Smith |
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e49ab60
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Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he found himself suddenly accosted by some kind of synaesthetic fixation with the woman: hearing the colour of her hair in the mosque, smelling the touch of her hand on the tube, tasting her smile while innocently walking the streets on his way to work; and this in turn led to a knowledge of every public convenience in London, led to the kind of masturbation that even a fifteen-year-old boy living in ..
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Zadie Smith |
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0b2e777
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On Beauty No, we could not itemize the list of sins they can't forgive us. The beautiful don't lack the wound. It is always beginning to snow. Of sins they can't forgive us speech is beautifully useless. It is always beginning to snow. The beautiful know this. Speech is beautifully useless. They are the damned. The beautiful know this. They stand around unnatural as statuary. They are the damned and so their sadness is perfect, delicate as ..
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poetry
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Zadie Smith |
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cfb2ca3
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love. ~ Archie Jones
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relationship-quotes
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Zadie Smith |
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ae66aa4
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But I was so much older then," sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, "I'm younger than that now." --
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Zadie Smith |
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638970b
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for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him.
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Zadie Smith |
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e57b5d3
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I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy's screwy--cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad.
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Zadie Smith |
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154485a
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What do you want to do Marvin?" croaked Alex, and then coughed the frog out. "Excuse me?" "Apart from being a milk operative. I mean, what do you want to do with you life?" Marvin eloquently groaned, like a disappointed academic, and slapped his own forehead. "I tell you something, yeah? Das an idiot's question, yeah? Life is going to do things to me. And that's all there is. And it's all good. Yogurts?"
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Zadie Smith |
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99c89a0
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But like all things, the business has two sides. Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they? Par exemplum: when I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery, it was. And they died because of it, you see? Poor bastards. Or rather I survived, to look at it in another way, do you see?
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Zadie Smith |
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469754b
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost. Though her friends--Merlin, Wan-Si, et al.--clapped her on the back and congratulated her for exorcising those fervid dreams of perdition and redemption, Clara quietly mourned the warmer touch she had waited for these nineteen years, the all-enveloping bear hug of the Savior, the One who was Alpha and Omega, both the beginn..
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Zadie Smith |
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7fed3f8
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Most Saturdays, as my own middle passage approached, I accompanied my mother to a protest march of one kind or another, against South Africa, against the government, against nuclear bombs, against racism, against cuts, against the deregulation of the banks or in support of the teachers' union, the GLC or the IRA. The purpose of all this was hard for me to grasp, given the nature of our enemy. I saw her on television most days--rigid handbag..
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Zadie Smith |
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59294d2
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The vision Marcia Blake had of these people, and had passed onto her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behaviour? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: 'To give them no excuse.
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Zadie Smith |
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ca1d8ad
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Mnostwo zjawisk, ktore dzis okreslamy mianem syndromow, mialo wtedy prostsze nazwy. Czasy byly prostsze. To wlasnie dlatego ludzie mowia o nich "stare, dobre czasy"."
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sindrome
stare-czasy
syndrom
syndrome
polish
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Zadie Smith |
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cbd08fc
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The shit is not the shit, he repeated solemnly, the pigeon is the shit.
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Zadie Smith |
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9354667
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People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive
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Zadie Smith |
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e7638f6
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To look back at all past work induces nausea [...] It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.
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Zadie Smith |
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eafcbaa
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Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones, who are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse still, who are given their big break only to come in on cue and die a death right there, center stage, for all to see.
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Zadie Smith |
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ec06f51
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No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed.
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Zadie Smith |
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4048378
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She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something.
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Zadie Smith |
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8185727
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though it was such a bizarre world, filled only with the echoing voices of people who had apparently already agreed with each other.
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Zadie Smith |
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f9e240c
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I don't remember the song she sang - I never really liked her songs - but standing in the empty concert hall, listening to her sing without backing music, with no support of any kind, I found that the sheer beauty of the voice, it's monumental dose of soul, the pain implicit within it, bypassed all my conscious opinions, my critical intelligence or sense of the sentimental, or whatever it is that people are referring to when they talk about..
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Zadie Smith |
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5b2fb40
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the feeling I had of moving into somebody else's broken ambition.
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Zadie Smith |
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f390f54
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I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. "You"
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Zadie Smith |
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bad7fad
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He's one of those people, thought Howard, who looks like one quality very much, and the quality in this case is 'noble'. Howard didn't much trust people like that, so full of one quality, like books with insistent covers.
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Zadie Smith |
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4c8441a
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Greeting cards routinely tell us that everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all of the time.
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poverty
love
water
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Zadie Smith |
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c4c2dd6
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No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods--come and gone with the sun.
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Zadie Smith |
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9997cf9
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What?" asked Natalie Blake. She really was too drunk to return to chambers. Her friend Layla was smiling, a little sadly. She was looking at the tablecloth. "Nothing. You're exactly the same." Natalie was in the middle of texting Melanie to warn her she would not be in now until tomorrow morning. "Right. It's not like I have to become another person just because - " "You always wanted to make it clear you weren't like the rest of us. You're..
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Zadie Smith |
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ebfb10d
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Samad! My mouth is like the grave! Whatever is told to me dies with me." Whatever was told to Zinat invariably lit up the telephone network, rebounded off aerials, radio waves, and satellites along the way, picked up finally by advanced alien civilizations as it bounced through the atmosphere of planets far removed from this one."
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keeping-secrets
secrets
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Zadie Smith |
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1f476b9
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Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.
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Zadie Smith |
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606bd4c
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We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn't feel this way?
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Zadie Smith |
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9f55622
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He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies.
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Zadie Smith |
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2a8c3b9
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Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not formed by it, either.
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Zadie Smith |
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a0dba83
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By Allah, how _thankful_ he is (_yes, madam, one moment, madam_), how _gladdened_ by the thought that Magid, Magid at least, will, in a matter of four hours, be flying east from this place and its demands, its constant cravings, this place where there exists neither patience nor pity, where the people want what they want _now_, right now (_We've been waiting twenty minutes for the vegetables_), expecting their lovers, their children, their ..
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pity
patience
impatience
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Zadie Smith |
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50cf09e
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Her beauty was not a sharp, cold commodity. She smelled musty, womanly, like a bundle of your favourite clothes... She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not (as with most of the girls Archie had run with in the past) like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it or when to just put it down. (~of Clara Bowden)
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love-quotes
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Zadie Smith |
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a8e786b
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I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age.
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Zadie Smith |
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60154d5
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We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over us. One
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Zadie Smith |
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6a902e3
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You don't know you're born. You don't. You don't know you're born
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Zadie Smith |
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8da42fb
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We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn't afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway. A
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Zadie Smith |
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b3a2904
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as if we were both trying to get on a see-saw at the same time--neither of us pressed too hard and a delicate equilibrium was allowed to persist.
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Zadie Smith |
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ab762bd
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Insanlari asla kucumsemeyin, kendilerinin olmayan aciyi izlerken, kotu haber verirken, televizyonda bombalarin dususunu seyrederken, telefonun obur ucundaki bastirilmis hickiriklari dinlerken, aldiklari keyfi de asla kucumsemeyin. Aci tek basina sadece Aci'dir. Fakat, Aci + Mesafe = eglence, rontgencilik, insani ilgi, gercekci sinema, keyifli bir kahkaha, anlayisli bir tebessum, kalkik bir kas veya gizlenmis nefret olabilir.
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pain
fun
tragicomic
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Zadie Smith |
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2e6cdff
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Bizi sevmeyen herhangi birinin yarali, eksik ve bir sekilde hasta oldugunu nereden cikariyoruz? Ozellikle de bir Tanri'yi veya aglayan Meryem Ana'yi veya Isa'nin yuzunu bize tercih ettikleri zaman onlara niye deli diyoruz? Aklini yitirmis. Cilgin. Kendi iyiligimizden, sevgimizin iyiliginden oylesine eminiz ki, bizden daha cok sevilmeye deger, bizden daha cok tapinilmaya deger bir sey olabilecegi dusuncesine bile tahammul edemiyoruz. Kutlama..
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love
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Zadie Smith |