Zadie Smith Quotes

But sometimes it's like you just meet someone and you just know that you're totally connected, and this person is, like, your brother - or your sister. Even if they don't, like, recognize it, you feel it. And in a lot of ways it don't matter if they do or they don't see that for what it is - all you can do is put the feeling out there. That's your duty. Then you just wait and see what comes back to you. That's the deal. ~ Zadie Smith

The whole plan's so high on the cheese factor it's practically Stilton ~ Zadie Smith

A peculiar idea. Once you're alive in this world, you're responsible." "For ~ Zadie Smith

It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants––packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends––that stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing. ~ Zadie Smith

Nobody can cast themselves out. ~ Zadie Smith

She was in breach of that feminine law that states that no weakness may be shown by a woman to another woman without a sacrifice of equal value being made in return. ~ Zadie Smith

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. ~ Zadie Smith

No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language. ~ Zadie Smith

White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. ~ Zadie Smith

It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, "Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me." Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll
then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time. ~ Zadie Smith

The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed. ~ Zadie Smith

Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy. ~ Zadie Smith

When I showed her my well-worn copy of Stormy Weather she reacted in a way I hadn't anticipated, she was offended by it - hurt, even. Why was everybody black? It was unkind, she said, to have only black people in a film, it wasn't fair. Maybe in America you could do that, but not here, in England, where everybody was equal anyway and there was no need to "go on about it." And ~ Zadie Smith

And perhaps for my mother this dream was the truth, and just by dreaming it she felt she had brought it to pass. ~ Zadie Smith

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? ~ Zadie Smith

And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day. ~ Zadie Smith

Some people
Samad for example
will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase "at the end of the day"
football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds
but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamentals. ~ Zadie Smith

But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance. ~ Zadie Smith

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage. ~ Zadie Smith

Travel had seemed the key to the kingdom, back then. One dreamed of a life that would enable travel. Howard looked through his window at a lamp-post buried to its waist in show supporting two chained-up, frozen bikes, identifiable only by the tips of their handlebars. He imagined waking up this morning and digging his bike out of the snow and riding to a proper job, the kind Belseys had had for generations, and found he couldn't imagine it. This interested Howard, for a moment: the idea that he could no longer gauge the luxuries of his own life. ~ Zadie Smith

The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action. ~ Zadie Smith

When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for 'The Simpsons' who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. ~ Zadie Smith

There is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody ~ Zadie Smith

That girl,' tutted Alsana as her front door slammed, 'swallowed an encyclopedia and a gutter at the same time. ~ Zadie Smith

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

Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. ~ Zadie Smith

Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two. ~ Zadie Smith

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. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It's a fairy-tale! ~ Zadie Smith

One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search. ~ Zadie Smith

Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts. ~ Zadie Smith

You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books. ~ Zadie Smith

There are two different kinds of glee club in this world. The first sing barbershop favourites and Gershwin tunes, they swing gently, moving from side to side and sometimes clicking their fingers and winking. Howard could basically deal with that type. He had got through those occasions graced by glee clubs of that type. But these boys were not of that type. Swaying and clicking and winking were just how they got warmed up. Tonight this glee club had chosen as their opener 'Pride (In the Name of Love)' by U2, which they had taken the trouble to transform into a samba. They swayed, they clicked, they winked. They did coordinated spins. They switched places with each other. They moved forward, they moved back – always retaining their formation. They smiled the kind of smile you might employ when trying to convince a lunatic to quit holding a gun to your mother's head. ~ Zadie Smith

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 an egg placed in your palm.
Hard, it is decorated with their face

and so their sadness is perfect.
The beautiful don't lack the wound.
Hard, it is decorated with their face.
No, we could not itemize the list.

Cape Cod, May 1974 ~ Zadie Smith

She noticed the most important thing of all, which is the dance lesson within the performance. ~ Zadie Smith

Don't mask self-doubt with contempt. ~ Zadie Smith

He smiles shyly at Leah. Aged ten he had a smile! Nathan Bogle: the very definition of desire for girls who had previously only felt that way about certain fragrant erasers. A smile to destroy the resolve of even the strictest teachers, other people's parents. Now she sees ten-year-olds and cannot believe they have inside them what she had inside her at the same age. ~ Zadie Smith

(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end?
(b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split?
(c) Is there a chance (and please check the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?

Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There's nothing to stop you---or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. ~ Zadie Smith

I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not. ~ Zadie Smith

Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl's hair. And I wish to God I could buy black hair products from black people for once. How we going to make it in this country if we don't make our own business? ~ Zadie Smith

They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana, it is not unusual to walk the streets and be suddenly confronted by sage words from the chalkfaced, blue-lipped, or eyebrowless. From across the street or from the other end of a tube carriage they will use their schizophrenic talent for seeing connections in the random (for discerning the whole world in a grain of sand, for deriving narrative from nothing) to riddle you, to rhyme you, to strip you down, to tell you who you are and where you're going (usually Baker Street - the great majority of modernday seers travel the Metropolitan Line) and why. But as a city we are not appreciative of these people. Our gut instinct is that they intend to embarrass us, that they're out to shame us somehow as they lurch down the train aisle, bulbous-eyed and with carbuncled nose, preparing to ask us, inevitably, what we are looking at. What the fuck we are looking at. As a kind of preemptive defense mechanism, Londoners have learned not to look, never to look, to avoid eyes at all times so that the dreaded question "What you looking at?" and its pitiful, gutless, useless answer - "Nothing" - might be avoided. ~ Zadie Smith

I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury. ~ Zadie Smith

The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential. ~ Zadie Smith

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

We're all black, and we all love to be black, and we all sing from our own hymn sheet. We're all surely black people, but we may be finally approaching a point of human history where you can't talk up or down to us anymore, but only to us. He's talking down to white people - how curious it sounds the other way round! In order to say such a thing, one would have to think collectively of white people, as a people of one mind who speak with one voice - a thought experiment in which we have no practice. But it's worth trying. It's only when you play the record backward that you hear the secret message. 3 ~ Zadie Smith

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

More silence; children's silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs. ~ Zadie Smith

The Jackson gaffe, with its Oedipal violence ("I want to cut his nuts out"), is especially poignant because it goes to the heart of a generational conflict in the black community, concerning what we will say in public and what we say in private. For it has been a point of honor, among the civil rights generation, that any criticism or negative analysis of our community, expressed, as they often are by white politicians, without context, without real empathy or understanding, should not be repeated by a black politician when the white community is listening, even if (especially if) the criticism happens to be true (more than half of all black American children live in single-parent households). ~ Zadie Smith

I don't want your babies, Felix. I can assure you I'm not sitting up here like some tragic fallen woman every night dreaming of having your babies." She began tracing a figure of eight with her fingernail along his stomach. The movement looked idle but the nail pressed in hard. "You realize of course that if it were the other way round there would be a law, there would be an actual law: John versus Jen in the high court. And John would put it to Jen that she did wilfully fuck him for five years, before dumping him without warning in the twilight of his procreative window, and taking up with young Jack-the-lad, only twenty-four years old and with a cock as long as my arm. The court rules in favor of John. Every time. Jen must pay damages. Huge sums. Plus six months in jail. No - nine. Poetic justice. ~ Zadie Smith

In a whisper he began begging for - and, as the sun set, received - the concession people always beg for: a little more time. ~ Zadie Smith

I am very selfish, really. I lived for love. ~ Zadie Smith

It was a kiss from the past. ~ Zadie Smith

Here the focus is narrow, almost obsessive. Everything that is not absolutely necessary to your happiness has been removed from the visual horizon. The dream is not only of happiness, but of happiness conceived in perfect isolation. Find your beach in the middle of the city. Find your beach no matter what else is happening. Do not be distracted from finding your beach. Find your beach even if - as in the case of this wall painting - it is not actually there. Create this beach inside yourself. Carry it with you wherever you go. The pursuit of happiness has always seemed to me a somewhat heavy American burden, but in Manhattan it is conceived as a peculiar form of duty. ~ Zadie Smith

Those are my bougainvillea - I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive. But Right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing. ~ Zadie Smith

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories. ~ Zadie Smith

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. ~ Zadie Smith

But didn't everyone get everything? Hadn't they had enough yet? Everything on earth is tailored for this everyone. Everyone gets all the TV programs, damn near all the cinema, and about eighty percent of all music. After that come the secondary medium of painting and those other visual arts that do not move. Those are generally just for someone and although you always hear people moaning that there isn't enough of them, in truth someone does all right. Galleries, museums, basements in Berlin, studio flats, journals, bare walls in urban centers - someone gets what they want and deserve, most of the time. But where are the things that no one wants? Every now and then Alex would see or hear something that appeared to be for no one but soon enough it turned out to be for someone and, after a certain amount of advertising revenue had been spent, would explode into the world for everyone. Who was left to make stuff for no one? ~ Zadie Smith

The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students. ~ Zadie Smith

I am from the Kilburn branch of the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation," said Hifan proudly.
Irie inhaled.
Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation," repeated Millat, impressed. "That's a wicked name. It's got a wicked kung-fu arse sound to it."
Irie frowned. "KEVIN?"
We are aware," said Hifan solemnly, pointing to the spot underneath the cupped flame where the initials were minutely embroidered, "that we have an acronym problem. ~ Zadie Smith

Claire spoke often in her poetry of the idea of "fittingness": that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it
no matter how small or insignificant both might be
are matched exactly, are fitting. This, Claire argued, is when we become truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful ... In Claire's presence, you were not faulty or badly designed, no, not at all. You were the fitting receptacle and instrument of your talents and beliefs and desires. ~ Zadie Smith

When everyone's building a fence, isn't it a true fool who lives out in the open? ~ Zadie Smith

He wanted to meet her for the first time, over and over...He told himself the story that this was the great tragedy of his heart. The great tragedy of his heart was that it always needed to be told a story. ~ Zadie Smith

We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention. ~ Zadie Smith

I can't add. I don't understand basic science. Or anything else. But I can read anything. I've always been able to, and I've always liked to. Even if I didn't understand it, I liked to. ~ Zadie Smith

She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn't time for anything else. ~ Zadie Smith

Yet a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses - a world consisting only of thrusting, vigorous men walking boldly out of frame - will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion. ~ Zadie Smith

I was brought up with the sense that I was absolutely no different from my brothers. I went to college thinking I was absolutely no different from the men in college. But that's not true. I'm fundamentally different. The problem was not being able to understand difference and equality at the same time. It's something that we can't seem to comprehend. You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. It's a mistake. ~ Zadie Smith

Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale. ~ Zadie Smith

That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way. ~ Zadie Smith

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

You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition. ~ Zadie Smith

My rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done. ~ Zadie Smith

But these people _announced_ their madness ... they flaunted their insanity, they weren't half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. ~ Zadie Smith

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

People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it. ~ Zadie Smith

Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby. ~ Zadie Smith

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 Shetlands might find excessive. ~ Zadie Smith

Blimey, thought Kelvin, what an eye-to-face ratio. When you want to say something delicate, you don't want that eye-to-face ration staring up at you. Big eyes, like a child's or a baby seal's; the physiognomy of innocence
looking at Archie Jones is like looking at something that expects to be clubbed round the head any second. ~ Zadie Smith

I am not as ingenious as these people. 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

An English girl might well believe
that time is how you spend your love. ~ Nick Laird

She wanted to read things -- could not resist wanting to read things -- and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexive habits baffled the girl, for she knew herself to be fantastically stupid about many things. Wasn't it possible that what others mistook as intelligence might in fact be only a sort of mutation of the will? She could sit in one place longer than other children be bored for hours without complaint, and was completely devoted to filling in every last corner of the coloring books Augustus Blake sometimes brought home. She could not help her mutated will -- no more than she could help the shape of her feet or the street on which she was born. She was unable to glean real satisfaction from accidents. In the child's mind a breach now appeared: between what she believed she knew of herself, essentially, and her essence as others seemed to understand it. She began to exist for other people, and if ever asked a question to which she did not know the answer she was wont to fold her arms across her body and look upward. As if the question itself were to obvious to truly concern her. ~ Zadie Smith

People with children will know this: when the childcare is over, it's over on the dot. You immediately have to go into child mode; there's no down time. ~ Zadie Smith

I wanted to love and to be loved. ~ Zadie Smith

I'm serious. I don't know how you work like that. My school shit is better organized, and I'm not in the business of World Domination. ~ Zadie Smith

Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better. ~ Zadie Smith

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt
something is gained but something is lost. ~ Zadie Smith

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources. ~ Zadie Smith

How long that song seemed - longer than life. ~ Zadie Smith

The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story. ~ Zadie Smith

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 paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: the New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps attacking, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. ~ Zadie Smith

Kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement. ~ Zadie Smith

English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control. ~ Zadie Smith

I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human - I only love to be so. ~ Zadie Smith

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

When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgement. 'Whatever, ~ Zadie Smith

It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy ~ Zadie Smith

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

So now I started playing hardball; now I picked the Dictaphone up and demanded to know about the shrapnel, for Harvey has some shrapnel in his groin, I know he does, and he knows I know. A doctor found it in a routine X-ray in 1991, forty-seven years after Harvey thought it had been removed. I was sixteen at the time, EMF had a hit with "Unbelievable" and I was wearing harem pants. If ~ Zadie Smith

Don't you think they're as bored as you are? You think you're somebody special? You think I wake up everyday so happy to see you? You're a snob, just in the other way. Do you think you are the only one who wants something else? Another life? ~ Zadie Smith

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. ~ Zadie Smith

So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn't drag ancient history around like a ball and chain. So there were men who were not neck-deep and sinking in the quagmire of the past. ~ Zadie Smith