Zadie Smith Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.

Zadie Smith
This is what divorce is: Taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.

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
She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.

Zadie Smith
… and catholics give out forgiveness at the same time politicians give out promises and whores give out.

Zadie Smith
A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.

Zadie Smith
She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.

Zadie Smith
Life's not a video game, Felix- there aren't a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn't actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.

Zadie Smith
You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

Zadie Smith
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
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.

Zadie Smith
It's such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

Zadie Smith
- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.

Zadie Smith
But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.

Zadie Smith
No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack

Zadie Smith
In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.

Zadie Smith
Pulchritude—beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

Zadie Smith
Ryan's freckles were a join-the-dot's enthusiast's wet dream.

Zadie Smith
Is there anything more likely to take the shine off an affair that when the lover strikes up a convivial relationship with the lovee's mother.

Zadie Smith
The thinnest covering of luck was on him like fresh dew. While he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes shit happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie.

Zadie Smith
Don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own... Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.

Zadie Smith
He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

Zadie Smith
Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.

Zadie Smith
13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands.
13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.

Zadie Smith
And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.

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

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

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

Zadie Smith
Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.

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