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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f390f54 | I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. "You" | Zadie Smith | ||
| bad7fad | 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. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 4c8441a | Greeting cards routinely tell us that everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all of the time. | love poverty water | Zadie Smith | |
| c4c2dd6 | 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. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 9997cf9 | 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.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| ebfb10d | 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." | keeping-secrets secrets | Zadie Smith | |
| 1f476b9 | Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 606bd4c | We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn't feel this way? | Zadie Smith | ||
| 9f55622 | He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 2a8c3b9 | Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not formed by it, either. | Zadie Smith | ||
| a0dba83 | 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 .. | impatience patience pity | Zadie Smith | |
| 50cf09e | 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) | love-quotes | Zadie Smith | |
| a8e786b | I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 60154d5 | 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 | Zadie Smith | ||
| 6a902e3 | You don't know you're born. You don't. You don't know you're born | Zadie Smith | ||
| 8da42fb | 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 | Zadie Smith | ||
| b3a2904 | 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. | Zadie Smith | ||
| ab762bd | 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. | fun pain tragicomic | Zadie Smith | |
| 2e6cdff | 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.. | love | Zadie Smith | |
| 935ed36 | He had not seen her since that afternoon. And with the miracle that is male compartmentalization he had barely thought of her either. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 6f74dce | 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? | denti-bianchi zadie-smith | Zadie Smith | |
| bca2ca2 | am so angry at you right now. | Zadie Smith | ||
| fce8f45 | grass can be seen, although it is important not to | Zadie Smith | ||
| 2560878 | 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. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 05f1fdb | If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. | tradition | Zadie Smith | |
| 405ae1b | 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. | safety | Zadie Smith | |
| 4e113e5 | 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. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 4c5df99 | 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. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 2dd1dd2 | Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 2742a53 | I'd decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 7f3db84 | 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 .. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 7cf8a17 | 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. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 5acb748 | 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." | Zadie Smith | ||
| 0434044 | 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." | Zadie Smith | ||
| 14d6c01 | 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." | Zadie Smith | ||
| 9d24fbe | I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win? | Zadie Smith | ||
| cb71892 | for the Owl there was something Infinitely Preferable About the Night. The Owl had difficulty explaining this to other birds. | Zadie Smith | ||
| b3665be | 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. | personhood social-distance | Zadie Smith | |
| 03bbeb4 | I couldn't afford to be offended. | Zadie Smith | ||
| cc286fa | Every New Year's Eve is impending apocalypse in miniature. | Zadie Smith | ||
| ba3a4bd | 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." | Zadie Smith | ||
| c854168 | 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.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 02d68e8 | 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. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 022e4d4 | 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. | Zadie Smith |