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935ed36
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He had not seen her since that afternoon. And with the miracle that is male compartmentalization he had barely thought of her either.
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Zadie Smith |
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6f74dce
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E in passato, si chiese Archie, la gente imbrogliava di meno? Era piu' onesta, lasciava la porta di casa aperta, affidava i figli ai vicini, faceva visite agli amici, aveva il conto aperto con il macellaio?
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denti-bianchi
zadie-smith
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Zadie Smith |
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bca2ca2
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am so angry at you right now.
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Zadie Smith |
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fce8f45
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grass can be seen, although it is important not to
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Zadie Smith |
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2560878
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then after a few miles you arrived at a new idea, that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing, for the more money a person had, then the more goodness--or potential for goodness--a person possessed.
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Zadie Smith |
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05f1fdb
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If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister.
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tradition
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Zadie Smith |
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405ae1b
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That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. 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 of disaster, even when it is man-made.
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safety
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Zadie Smith |
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4e113e5
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That there might be any practical divergence between my mother's situation and her own did not seem to occur to Aimee, and this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewing the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality.
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Zadie Smith |
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4c5df99
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Chuck functions here as a kind of authenticity fetish, allowing Hans (and the reader) the nostalgic pleasure of returning to a narrative time when symbols and mottoes were full of meaning and novels weren't neurotic, but could aim themselves simply and purely at transcendent feeling.
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Zadie Smith |
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2dd1dd2
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Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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Zadie Smith |
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2742a53
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I'd decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.
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Zadie Smith |
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7f3db84
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It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read the New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with the New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the ..
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Zadie Smith |
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7cf8a17
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Well, they got that habit from us. We always wanted to be seen to be right. To be on the right side of an issue. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing.
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Zadie Smith |
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5acb748
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A brother don't need a gate - he jumps the fence. That's street.' 'Again, please?' said Howard. 'Street, street,' bellowed Zora. It's like, "being street", knowing the street - in Levi's sad little world if you're a Negro you have some kind of mysterious holy communion with sidewalks and corners."
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Zadie Smith |
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0434044
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It just goes to show,' said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, "you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe."
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Zadie Smith |
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14d6c01
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Happy is the novelist," claims Nabokov, "who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives."
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Zadie Smith |
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9d24fbe
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I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win?
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Zadie Smith |
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cb71892
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for the Owl there was something Infinitely Preferable About the Night. The Owl had difficulty explaining this to other birds.
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Zadie Smith |
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b3665be
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At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly opt out (by choice, by default) of the things they have embraced. We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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social-distance
personhood
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Zadie Smith |
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03bbeb4
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I couldn't afford to be offended.
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Zadie Smith |
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cc286fa
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Every New Year's Eve is impending apocalypse in miniature.
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Zadie Smith |
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ba3a4bd
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But what does soulful even mean? The dictionary has it this way: "expressing or appearing to express deep and often sorrowful feeling." The culturally black meaning adds several more shades of color. First shade: soulfulness is sorrowful feeling transformed into something beautiful, creative and self-renewing, and--as it reaches a pitch--ecstatic. It is an alchemy of pain."
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Zadie Smith |
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c854168
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I will admit that in the past, when I have met connoisseurs, I've found it a bit hard to believe in them entirely. Philistinism often comes with a side order of distrust. How can this person possibly love as many things as she appears to love? Sometimes, in a sour spirit, I am tempted to feel that my connoisseur friends have the time for all this liberal study because they have no children. But that is the easy way out. True connoisseurs we..
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Zadie Smith |
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02d68e8
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Cigarettes took them to medals, which took them to guns, which took them to radios, which took them to jeeps. By midnight, Samad had won three jeeps, seven guns, fourteen medals, the land attached to Gozan's sister's house, and an IOU for four horses, three chickens and a duck.
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Zadie Smith |
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022e4d4
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The stupidity/pleasure axis I apply to popular artists: how much pleasure they give versus how stupid one has to become to receive said pleasure.
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Zadie Smith |
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8ad8bda
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So I might say to her: look, the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes--and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.
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relativism
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Zadie Smith |
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9b3a669
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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 smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised ..
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Zadie Smith |
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902709d
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Faced with the same reality, we in the West tend to opt for a stiff drink instead. But people will insist upon shooting us sideways glances and saying things like, "It's two o'clock in the afternoon!" and so we put down our glasses and sigh."
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Zadie Smith |
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e1d1bca
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They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire.
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Zadie Smith |
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0537619
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She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.
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relationships
people
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Zadie Smith |
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15df115
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I don't know about you but I find I want to resist Buber here. Because personally I am pretty attached to my own feelings (and the complex, fascinating personality they imply). But even if I can't accept Buber totally here, I do find him a useful correction to some of my worse instincts. Looking at my life through a Buber lens, for example, I see that it is quite possible that my feelings, as strong as they may be, may disclose no more of r..
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feelings
reality
buber
i-it
i-thou
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Zadie Smith |
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8a3a215
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Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if he starts burning other people's things, then he loses something sacred also. Everyone gets what's coming, sooner or later.
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Zadie Smith |
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f6b142e
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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. At this moment, all over the world--and most recently in America--the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.
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Zadie Smith |
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5e324db
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Did all friendships--all relations--involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power?
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Zadie Smith |
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92dc721
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At least then, we have the satisfaction of a little short-term pleasure instead of a lifetime of feeling inadequate.
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Zadie Smith |
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3732f47
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Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.
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Zadie Smith |
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847a82c
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Lanier is interested in the ways in which people "reduce themselves" in order to make a computer's description of them appear more accurate. "Information systems," he writes, "need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality" (my italics). .... When a human being becomes a set of data on a Web site like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibili..
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Zadie Smith |
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bb6211b
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Novels are what I know, and the novel door in my personality is always open.
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personality
reading
novels
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Zadie Smith |
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81e2bd2
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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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59fe39e
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Without the balancing setting of everyday life all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
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Zadie Smith |
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ad3ffd9
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Libraries are not failing "because they are libraries." Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay."
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Zadie Smith |
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3f3cd20
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Everybody's got their tribe. Whose tribe are you in anyway?
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Zadie Smith |
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2af1aff
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A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow. When
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Zadie Smith |
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9fd35ef
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A feminist who had always been supported by men--first my father and now the Noted Activist--and who, though she continually harangued me about the "nobility of labor," had never, as far as I knew, actually been gainfully employed."
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Zadie Smith |