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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6076d24 | I thought it odd that my father should travel eight miles to Lambert's for comfort when Lambert seemed already to have suffered the kind of abandonment my father feared so badly | Zadie Smith | ||
| 59b8ccd | To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 2af1aff | 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 | Zadie Smith | ||
| 90612b8 | Back then, we were all still willing to take the "risk," if "risk" is the right word to describe entering into the lives of others, not merely in symbol but in reality." | socializing | Zadie Smith | |
| b4d11ff | Maybe a certain kind of ignorance was the condition. Into the pure nothingness of my non-knowledge something sublime (an event?) beyond (beneath?) consciousness was able to occur. | change-quotes | Zadie Smith | |
| 524a345 | Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites,Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites. | Algernon Charles Swinburne | ||
| 3cdfb15 | In this lengthy riposte, the philosopher informs Paulinus that "learning how to live takes a whole life," and the sense most of us have that our lives are cruelly brief is a specious one: "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it." | life-and-living life-quotes | Zadie Smith | |
| 67ac7bb | I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 94c8cac | Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity. | faith | Zadie Smith | |
| 9fd35ef | 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." | Zadie Smith | ||
| 2c76c63 | Despair the twin-born of devotion. | Algernon Charles Swinburne | ||
| 1d8a6ba | It looks backward, at the past, and it learns from what's gone before. Some people never learn." My" -- | Zadie Smith | ||
| e021455 | It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 60edc4a | Extreme inequality fractures communities, and after a while the cracks gape so wide the whole edifice comes tumbling down. | Zadie Smith | ||
| efdf6be | Actually creating an animal just so it can die -- it's like being God! I mean personally I'm a Hindu, yeah? I'm not religious or nothing, but you know, I believe in the sanctity of life, yeah? And these people, like, the mouse, plot its every move, yeah, when it's going to have kids, when it's going to die. It's just . | Zadie Smith | ||
| 70769f3 | Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name. | Algernon Charles Swinburne | ||
| 1b6301f | She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive. That's what her plain white linen trousers were for, her blue-and-white-striped "Breton" T-shirt, her frayed espadrilles, her severe and beautiful African head--everything so plain, so understated, completely out of step with the spirit of the time, and with the place." | Zadie Smith | ||
| f6ebc54 | From where I stood it was a pose that collapsed many periods in her life into one: mother and lover, big sister, best friend, superstar and diplomat, billionaire and street kid, foolish girl and woman of substance. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 4d7853f | But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 769780a | Crazy enough to start a war. There aren't many people like that. Most of us just follow along once war has been announced. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 0b6130b | Once you almost said--to a sneaky fellow from the Daily News, who was inquiring--you almost turned to him and said, Motherfucker, I am music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 248f44e | Neither my readers nor I are in the relatively sunlit uplands depicted in White Teeth anymore. But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory, but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and *reimagined* if it is to survive. | optimism outlook politics progress white-teeth | Zadie Smith | |
| aeb507e | Forget that I remember And dream that I forget. | Algernon Charles Swinburne | ||
| 1d6b668 | A blatant Bassarid of Boston, a rampant Maenad of Massachusetts. | Algernon Charles Swinburne | ||
| ccdda25 | Well, we can say that Aimee lives in her bubble," he said, interrupting me, "and so does your friend and, by the way, so do you. It's possible that it's like this for everyone. The size of the bubble is different, this is all. And perhaps the thickness of the--what do you call this in English?--skin--film. The thin layer on a bubble." | Zadie Smith | ||
| e19dc8c | No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless | Zadie Smith | ||
| abc86eb | I don't see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don't see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can't afford one." Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly. "Children can be a kind of wealth," he said." | Zadie Smith | ||
| 3277cc2 | People are not poor because they've made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they're poor. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 1152eb3 | Great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They'd met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 62250b1 | Everybody knows that if people hang around for any length of time in an urban area without purpose they are likely to become "antisocial." | antisocialism | Zadie Smith | |
| c13dd9c | But first a description: Clara Bowden was beautiful in all senses except maybe, by virtue of being black, the classical. Clara Bowden was magnificently tall, black as ebony and crushed sable, with hair plaited in a horseshoe which pointed up when she felt lucky, down when she didn't. At this moment it was up. It is hard to know whether that was significant. She needed no bra - she was independent, even of gravity - she wore a red halterneck.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| bfbdacc | The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn't doubt was the real one, but which I couldn't 'speak to,' to use a favorite phrase of his. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 3fd1e12 | A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward. | Zadie Smith | ||
| d440806 | It's the fear of being mistaken for Joyce that has always ensured that I ignore the box marked "biracial" and tick the box marked "black" on any questionnaire I fill out, and call myself unequivocally a black writer and roll my eyes at anyone who insists that Obama is not the first black president but the first biracial one. But I also know in my heart that it's an equivocation; I know that Obama has a double consciousness, is black and, at.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| fe0946e | many learned things can be said about the Venus of Urbino but if you don't open your eyes and recognize her first and foremost as an erotic object how can you claim that you've seen her at all? | Zadie Smith | ||
| 83ce959 | it's a good friend who wakes a friend from her dream | Zadie Smith | ||
| 9a32131 | But I haven't described Dream City. I'll try to. It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither-this-nor-that beige of your skin--well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| dd3dbdb | Mum, you just said it yourself: you can't save everybody. | Zadie Smith | ||
| c709dba | Our mothers served as our balance, as our foot-rests. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 68f571c | It had to do with emotion. Whatever I was feeling I was able to express very clearly, I could "put it over." | Zadie Smith | ||
| 36ac94f | Maybe you could say she was overly precise sometimes, not especially creative, or lacking in soul. | Zadie Smith | ||
| d7a6282 | It felt to me as if I were on a certain train, heading wherever it was people like me usually went...except now suddenly something was different. I'd been informed that I would be getting off at an unexpected stop, further down the line. I thought of my father, pushed off the train before he'd barely left the station. And of Tracey, so determined to jump off, exactly *because* she'd rather walk than be told what stop was hers or how far she.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| ca85444 | Well, maybe I use the wrong word in English. I mean that for Lamin the future is as certain as the past. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 470c2f8 | Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better. | Zadie Smith |