Zadie Smith - On Beauty (2005)

19 Sourced Quotes

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This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn't feel you could call people. They didn't feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?

Zadie Smith
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.

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
A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.

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 was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.

Zadie Smith
Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.

Zadie Smith
I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.

Zadie Smith
You don't have favorites among your children but you do have allies.

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

Zadie Smith
Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.

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

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
- 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
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
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