Quotes from Zadie Smith

still laughing but with the same sorrow she had felt when a hitherto perfectly nice cabbie began to tell her that all the Jews in the first tower has been warned beforehand or that you can't trust Mexicans not to steal the rug from under your feet or that more roads were built under Stalin...

She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive.

But i cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the *truth*. I have to worry about the truth that can be *lived with*.

But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.

But darling, I am clean. Two years clean." "Cept the coke, weed, drink, pills . . ." "I said I'm clean, not a bloody Mormon!

What I have realized, is that the generations,' Samad continued as they sped through miles and miles of unchanging flatlands, 'they speak to each other, Jones. It's not a line, Life is not a line -- this is not palm-reading -- it's a circle, and they speak to us. That is why you cannot read fate; you must experience it.

It was the same now. Always the fear of consequences. Always this terrible inertia.

Ryan was convinced of the aging fifties motto 'Live fast, die young', and, though his scooter didn't do more than 22 m.p.h. downhill, he liked to warn Clara in grim tones not to get 'too involved', for he wouldn't be here long; he was 'going out' early and with a 'bang'".

On her first day at the school her mother had explained to her she was about to enter the devil's lair, filled her satchel with two hundred copies of the Watchtower, and instructed her to go do the Lord's work

Ludzie nie zaklepuj? sobie innych ludzi. Podejmuj? ?wiadom? decyzj?, ?e b?d? z nimi. To wymaga wiary. Rysujesz ko?o na piasku i zgadzasz si? w nim sta?, i wierzy? w nie.

Or maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous.

You don't come to live here [New York City] unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. 'A reality shaped around your own desires' — there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

I can't rid myself of the need to do "something," to make "something," to feel that this new expanse of time hasn't been "wasted.

Why do you insist on taking the scooter if you know you're not going to want to use it?'The child spoke with her wet lips brushing the flesh of her mother's ear: 'I don't know what I'm going to want until when I want it.

Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate

the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bombs fall on television, from listening to stifled sobs from the other end of a telephone line. Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt. Alsana sensed all these and more

it's about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don't you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?" He

But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain.

begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don't know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don't know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins. The closer you get to the pit, the more you begin to have the

I wrote an article for The Women's Earth recently. I described a school I worked in where I gave all the children a potted spider plant and told them to look after it for a week like a daddy or mommy looks after a baby. Each child chose which parent they were going to emulate. This lovely little Jamaican boy, Winston, chose his daddy. The next week his mother phoned and asked why I'd asked Winston to feed his plant Pepsi and put it in front of the television.

Kiki began to giggle. Now Howard let go of Zora and held his wife instead, gripping he from behind. His arms could not go entirely around her, but still they walked in this manner down the small hill towards the gates of the park. This was one of the little ways in which eh said sorry. They were meant to add up each day.

Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.

She let Howard reinvent, retouch. When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of 'Hallelujah' by a kid called Buckley, Kiki had thought yes, that's right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day.

A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.