Quotes from Zadie Smith

To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.

I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. "You

I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy's screwy—cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad.

But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty.

To the suffering person, suffering is solely suffering. It is only for others, as a symbol, that suffering takes on any meaning or purpose. No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil rights movement. They just shook, suffered, screamed, and died. Pain is the least symbolic thing there is.

He's one of those people, thought Howard, who looks like one quality very much, and the quality in this case is 'noble'. Howard didn't much trust people like that, so full of one quality, like books with insistent covers.

Back then, we were all still willing to take the "risk," if "risk" is the right word to describe entering into the lives of others, not merely in symbol but in reality.

Did all friendships—all relations—involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power?

She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not (as with most of the girls Archie had run with in the past) like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.

What do you want to do Marvin? croaked Alex, and then coughed the frog out. Excuse me? Apart from being a milk operative. I mean, what do you want to do with you life? Marvin eloquently groaned, like a disappointed academic, and slapped his own forehead. I tell you something, yeah? Das an idiot's question, yeah? Life is going to do things to me. And that's all there is. And it's all good. Yogurts?

But like all things, the business has two sides. Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they? Par exemplum: when I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery, it was. And they died because of it, you see? Poor bastards. Or rather I survived, to look at it in another way, do you see?

Time is not what it is but how it is felt...

He had not seen her since that afternoon. And with the miracle that is male compartmentalization he had barely thought of her either.

If our elected representatives have contempt for us, if the forces of so-called law and order likewise hold us in contempt, it's because they think we have no recourse, and no power, except for the one force they have long assumed too splintered, too divided and too forgotten to be of any use: the power of the people. 

Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do 'something', that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I'm not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.

E in passato, si chiese Archie, la gente imbrogliava di meno? Era piu' onesta, lasciava la porta di casa aperta, affidava i figli ai vicini, faceva visite agli amici, aveva il conto aperto con il macellaio?

The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real world person called Mark Zuckerberg. It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.

No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun.

You're next. It's the next thing. Next stop Kilburn Station. The doors fold inwards, urban insect closing its wings.

Claire spoke often in her poetry of the idea of 'fittingness': that is, when your chosen pursuit and your ability to achieve it - no matter how small or insignificant both might be - are matched exactly, are fitting.

The vision Marcia Blake had of these people, and had passed onto her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behaviour? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: 'To give them no excuse.

The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn't doubt was the real one, but which I couldn't 'speak to,' to use a favorite phrase of his.

am so angry at you right now.