Quotes from Zadie Smith

What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission. Oh

the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity.

We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over us. One

She could not do distress. Anger was so much easier. And quicker and harder and better. If I start crying, I'll never stop –you hear people say that; Kiki heard people say it all the time in the hospital. A backlog of sadness for which there would never be sufficient time

The thing I feared was no longer my parents' authority over me but that they might haul out into the open their own intimate fears, their melancholy and regrets.

I'd decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.

The story was the price you paid for the rhythm.

Porque el divorcio es eso: quitarle cosas que no ya no necesita a una persona a la que ya no quieres.

All day long I can look forward to a popsicle.

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...Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if he starts burning other people's things, then he loses something sacred also. Everyone gets what's coming, sooner or later.

I knew my mother was in the process of becoming, or trying to become, "an intellectual," because my father often threw this term at her as a form of insult during their arguments.

But I was so much older then," sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, "I'm younger than that now.

Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one.

We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn't afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway. A

Only as an adult did I come to truly admire [my mother]...for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself

as if we were both trying to get on a see-saw at the same time—neither of us pressed too hard and a delicate equilibrium was allowed to persist.

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my father's children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years...whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face

She was that age. Whatever she said burst like genius into centuries of silence. Whatever she touched was the first stroke of its kind. Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but carved from certainty. Whatever she thought was the first time such a thought had ever been thunk.

oh, he loves her; just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly)

for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him.

kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement.

We worried for her. We tend to assume the worst, here in Willesden. We watched her watching the shuttlecock. Pock, smash. Pock, smash. As if one player could imagine only a violent conclusion and the other only a hopeful return.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand, but tell it.