Zadie Smith Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

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
If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.

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
You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.

Zadie Smith
He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire. The kind of talk that only increases it.

Zadie Smith
This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

Zadie Smith
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

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
Because this is the other thing about immigrants: they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

Zadie Smith
It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love.

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

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
But still I'm going to write.... there are still books that make me hopeful, because they function as human products in the greatest sense.

Zadie Smith
Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.

Zadie Smith
You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.

Zadie Smith
Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.

Zadie Smith