Quotes from Zadie Smith

A brother don't need a gate – he jumps the fence. That's street.' 'Again, please?' said Howard. 'Street, street,' bellowed Zora. It's like, "being street", knowing the street – in Levi's sad little world if you're a Negro you have some kind of mysterious holy communion with sidewalks and corners.

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.

Liberal? Hosh-kosh nonsense!' No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed.

So now I started playing hardball; now I picked the Dictaphone up and demanded to know about the shrapnel, for Harvey has some shrapnel in his groin, I know he does, and he knows I know. A doctor found it in a routine X-ray in 1991, forty-seven years after Harvey thought it had been removed. I was sixteen at the time, EMF had a hit with "Unbelievable" and I was wearing harem pants. If

Elsewhere in London, offices are open plan/floor to ceiling glass/sites of synergy/wireless/gleaming. There persists a belief in the importance of a ping-pong table.

Why is it that everyone from your school is a criminal crackhead? - Why's everyone from yours a Tory minister?

Without the balancing setting of everyday life all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad. Quickly you become hysterical. Consequently I can't tell whether the news coming out of my home is really as bad as it appears to be, or whether objects perceived from three thousand miles away are subject to exaggerations of size and color.

An emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy—if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty. It's not a very civilized emotion.

Jeder Augenblick geschieht zweifach: innen und außen, und es sind zwei unterschiedliche Geschichten.

She was in breach of that feminine law that states that no weakness may be shown by a woman to another woman without a sacrifice of equal value being made in return.

A mortifying sense of porousness.

Don't let your mind set limits that aren't really there.

Maybe a certain kind of ignorance was the condition. Into the pure nothingness of my non-knowledge something sublime (an event?) beyond (beneath?) consciousness was able to occur.

In this lengthy riposte, the philosopher informs Paulinus that "learning how to live takes a whole life," and the sense most of us have that our lives are cruelly brief is a specious one: "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

The enviable style of the young is little protection against catastrophe.

At least then, we have the satisfaction of a little short-term pleasure instead of a lifetime of feeling inadequate.

C]haracter occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes. Naturally, it can be destroyed lightly, too.

Kiki turned to her husband with a thesis for a face, of which only Howard could know every line and reference.

But as midnight inevitably came and went without the horsemen of the apocalypse making an appearance, Clara surprised herself by falling into a melancholy. For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt—something is gained but something is lost.

It was a tough decision.' Mickey crosses his arms and scoffs, 'No such thing, mate. You're either right or you ain't. And

It just goes to show,' said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, "you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

Erskine's freckles did incredible diplomatic work for him. Howard had often wished for a similarly benign face to show the world.

when you're writing it's such an obsessive thing, and then when you're done it's like pushing something out of your body (...)

It's so funny how many people today really believe themselves to be the most advanced people who ever lived, 'the arc of history bending towards justice' or whatever the quote is. To me, being attendant to history is a kind of resistance. It offers the possibility of alternative worlds, that there is a reality outside the one we are living in.