Quotes from Zadie Smith

Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes.

hr?za se ze vÅ¡ech emocí, co jich na svÄ›tÄ› je, nejvíc vzpírá tomu, aby si ji ?lovÄ›k dokázal udržet déle než okamžik.

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

It's about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.

There's always somebody who wants to be the Big Man, and take everything for themselves, and tell everybody how to think and what to do. When, actually, it's he who is weak. But if the Big Men see that you see that they are weak they have no choice but to destroy you. That is the real tragedy.

This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love. ~ Archie Jones

They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire.

Her beauty was not a sharp, cold commodity. She smelled musty, womanly, like a bundle of your favourite clothes... 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. (~of Clara Bowden)

But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.

She was never home. Irie was stuck between a rock and a hard place, like Ireland, like Israel, like India.

I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age.

It's a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers---women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance.

She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something.

My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.

software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.

though it was such a bizarre world, filled only with the echoing voices of people who had apparently already agreed with each other.

Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a selection of scented erasers. Time is not what it is but how it is felt, and Zora felt no different.

It hurts just as much as it is worth.

You don't know you're born. You don't. You don't know you're born

Det är det som är en skilsmässa: man tar saker man inte längre vill ha från människor man inte längre älskar.

It looks backward, at the past, and it learns from what's gone before. Some people never learn." My

IT'S NOT FAIR! I CAN'T GO ON HAJJ. I'VE GOT TO GO TO SCHOOL. I DON'T HAVE TIME TO GO TO MECCA. IT'S NOT FAIR! "Welcome to the twentieth century. It's not fair. It's never fair.

free-form conversations that could eat up whole days.

He didn't get depressed, but he managed this not by looking away but by looking closely, attending to each logical step in any particular problem, so that the problem itself filled all available mental space.