Zadie Smith - White Teeth (2000)

37 Sourced Quotes

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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.

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
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 divorce is: Taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.

Zadie Smith
She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.

Zadie Smith
Surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

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

Zadie Smith
A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals—that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.

Zadie Smith
… dressed all in yellow spreading warmth and the promise of sex.

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

Zadie Smith
His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out.

Zadie Smith
Where I come from," said Archie, "a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her." "Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean," said Samad tersely, "that it is a good idea.

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

Zadie Smith
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
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 - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.

Zadie Smith
It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

Zadie Smith
Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.

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

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

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

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

Zadie Smith