Quotes from Zadie Smith

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

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

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

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.

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

The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.

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.

You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.

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

Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.

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

Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

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

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

Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.

Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I'm not saying that's what they really are. I'm just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you.

They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.

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.

I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.