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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5083dcc | There was a sense in which she couldn't quite believe in violence, as if it were, in her view, too stupid to be real. I knew--from Lambert only--that her own childhood had been full of violence, emotional and physical, but she rarely referred to it other than calling it "that nonsense," or sometimes "those ridiculous people," because when she ascended to the life of the mind everything that was not the life of the mind stopped existing for .. | Zadie Smith | ||
| a68242d | Rightfully she should have been fearful of life. Instead she was recklessly bold. | Zadie Smith | ||
| fdcc6de | You came in with a picky head, uneven and coarse, disguised underneath a baseball cap, and you left swiftly afterwards a new man, smelling sweetly of coconut oil and with a cut as sharp and clean as a swear word. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 0182cc9 | Yet when I waved at those two girls I noticed I couldn't rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood, or of childish friendship. | Zadie Smith | ||
| d7a4a9d | It was the spirit of the times: we applied high theory to shampoo ads, philosophy to NWA videos. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 8dea3b8 | I saw I was lucky to have Lamin: while he engaged in his favorite activity--intense, whispered financial negotiation, with several parties at once--I was free to wander over to the cannon, to sit astride it and look out over the water. I tried to | Zadie Smith | ||
| d6199ab | But it's hard, when you're at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 3e02b26 | The clarity disturbed me. "She" | Zadie Smith | ||
| f0fd88f | Oh, sister - good news - I'm getting married!" I hugged her but felt the familiar smile fasten itself on my face, the same one I wore in London and New York in the face of similar news, and I experienced the same acute sense of betrayal. I was ashamed to feel that way but couldn't help it, a piece of my heart closed against her." | Zadie Smith | ||
| 0f30b24 | Don't give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth! | Zadie Smith | ||
| b437fa7 | My late twenties had passed in a weird state of timelessness, and I think now that not everyone could have fallen into a life like that, that I must have been somehow primed for it. | Zadie Smith | ||
| a79db79 | Yes, yes, many months ago. But your mother is someone who will always be in my life. She's not the kind of person who leaves your life when she's in it. Anyway, when someone you care about gets ill, all the other business...it just goes. | Zadie Smith | ||
| b0d7a0d | Subtle people. Two steps ahead. | Zadie Smith | ||
| de3e671 | but that coldness stopped up the sentence in my mouth. "What" | Zadie Smith | ||
| 299dc29 | Poverty is not just a headline, my love, it's a lived reality, on the ground--and education is at the heart of it." "I" | Zadie Smith | ||
| eb9bc0d | The river split this finger of land in half throughout its length, and the airport was on the other side. | Zadie Smith | ||
| d9bba1b | Nobody seemed sure if it was the last ferry. We waited. Time passed, the sky turned pink. | Zadie Smith | ||
| cba8b2e | I was completely unreachable, for the first time in years. It gave me an unexpected but not unpleasant sense of stillness, of being outside of time: it reminded me somehow of childhood. | Zadie Smith | ||
| b1db0ac | who might have run faster than a speeding train, if they had been free to do so, but for whom, born in the wrong time, in the wrong place, all stops were closed, who were never even permitted to enter the station. And wasn't I so much freer than any of them--born in England, in modern times--not to mention so much lighter, so much straighter of nose, so much less likely to be mistaken for the very essence of Blackness itself? What could pos.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 72fb3bb | free-form conversations that could eat up whole days. | Zadie Smith | ||
| e20f38d | Now see, with me, said Louie, tiring suddenly of his daughter's talk, with me I didn't need dance school, matter of fact I used to rule the dance floor! | Zadie Smith | ||
| 14052a4 | They'd met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take. * * * | Zadie Smith | ||
| 12904ec | yes, with the mothers she had to make a little more effort, drowning them in language until they understood how out of their depth they were and the thin stream of their objections was completely subsumed by the quick-running currents of my mother's talk. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 57ecaeb | She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world's sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 73c6120 | Yes, you could make something ornamental. That's your freedom! Take it! Who knows? You might be the next Augusta Savage!" I" | Zadie Smith | ||
| 797b3ea | There is a mania in the playground for grabbing vaginas. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 7000da4 | It was like tag, but a girl was never "It," only boys were "It," girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top." | Zadie Smith | ||
| 081d38e | Everybody's path crossed with hers at the same moment, as soon as she emerged she was uncontained by space and time, with not one path to cross but all paths--they were all hers, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, all ways were her way--and of course millions of people felt as I did. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 5eaf847 | Marilyn Monroe was pretty far along that curve, as close as one can come to dancing while still walking. In her classic 1953 movie Niagara she takes a legendary walk away from the camera, hips swinging--roiling--in a mode long since memorialized by catwalk models, drag queens, prima donnas, freaks and queers, street punks of all persuasions. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 9678fbf | Usually when we compliment a dancer we say: she makes it look easy. This is not the case with Aimee. Part of her secret, I felt as I watched her, is the way she's able to summon joy out of effort, for no move of hers flowed instinctively or naturally from the next, each "step" was clearly visible, choreographed, and yet as she sweated away at their execution, the hard work itself felt erotic, it was like witnessing a woman cross the line at.. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 2e9a935 | She accepts everything that has happened to her as her destiny, no more surprised or alienated to be who she is than I imagine Cleopatra was to be Cleopatra. I | Zadie Smith | ||
| 0eb499b | when she'd finished she would give one of four possible judgments. "Zippy"--which was good; "Important"--which was very good; "Controversial"--which could be either good or bad, you never knew; or "Lidderary," which was pronounced with a sigh and an eye roll and was very bad." | Zadie Smith | ||
| 827e2a6 | A superstar takes everybody everywhere. "What" | Zadie Smith | ||
| 7617136 | can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize? | Zadie Smith | ||
| 3fa66b2 | Even the simplest ideas I'd brought with me did not seem to work | Zadie Smith | ||
| ba582a3 | I didn't know what to do with all of the sadness. A hundred and fifty years! Do you have any idea how long a hundred and fifty years is in the family of man? She clicked her fingers, and I thought of Miss Isabel, counting children in for the beats of a dance. That long, she said. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 3afc57b | She held herself apart, always. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 47e8505 | She noticed the most important thing of all, which is the dance lesson within the performance. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 64592e0 | It was a tough decision.' Mickey crosses his arms and scoffs, 'No such thing, mate. You're either right or you ain't. And | Zadie Smith | ||
| afca835 | Nastoiashchee der'mo (takova byla mantra Mo) - eto golubi, a ne ikh der'mo. Razvod - eto kogda otbiraesh' to, chto tebe bol'she ne nuzhno u tekh, kogo ty bol'she ne liubish'. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 1660b61 | it's about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don't you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?" He" | Zadie Smith | ||
| 9a365f3 | but to create a real feeling--made | Zadie Smith | ||
| 209a8a1 | Together we entered this new space that now opened up between people, a connection with no precise beginning or end, that was always potentially open, and my mother was one of the first people I knew to understand this and exploit it fully. | Zadie Smith | ||
| 5351877 | The Noted Activist | Zadie Smith |