Zadie Smith Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

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
These are hysterical times; any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped.

Zadie Smith
I wonder sometimes whether critics shouldn't be more like teachers, giving a gold star or a black cross, but either way accompanied by some kind of useful advice.

Zadie Smith
(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)

Zadie Smith
His death is like the soft down on the back of your hand, passing unnoticed in the firmest of handshakes, though the slightest breeze makes every damn one of the tiny hairs stand on end.

Zadie Smith
The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.

Zadie Smith
.. and the devil won another easy hand in God's poker game.

Zadie Smith
Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you're going.

Zadie Smith