Quotes from Zadie Smith

You could drown in memories like these, but she tried to swim free of them. She jumped over the small wall that fringed the Iqbal house, as she had a million times over, and rang the doorbell. Past tense, future imperfect

Trying to preserve some space for yourself in the crowded domestic sphere feels like obsessively cupping your hands around thin air. You carve it out, the time you need, after much anxiety and debate, and get into the separate space and look between your hands and there it is — nothing. An empty victory.

Irie gözlerini devirdi. Bazen insan farkl? olmak ister. Ama bazen de, herkes gibi olmak için, ba??ndaki saç? bile feda etmeye haz?rd?r.

no geographic or racial qualification guarantees a writer her subject. Baldwin's pedigree didn't gift him The Jimmy. Only interest, knowledge and love will do that...

In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won't matter any more because they can't because they mustn't because they're too long and they're too tortuous and they're just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it.

Racial homogeneity is no guarantor of peace, any more than racial heterogeneity is fated to fail.

It felt to me as if I were on a certain train, heading wherever it was people like me usually went...except now suddenly something was different. I'd been informed that I would be getting off at an unexpected stop, further down the line. I thought of my father, pushed off the train before he'd barely left the station. And of Tracey, so determined to jump off, exactly *because* she'd rather walk than be told what stop was hers or how far she was allowed to go.

It was the spirit of the times: we applied high theory to shampoo ads, philosophy to NWA videos.

I saw I was lucky to have Lamin: while he engaged in his favorite activity—intense, whispered financial negotiation, with several parties at once—I was free to wander over to the cannon, to sit astride it and look out over the water. I tried to

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories. Outside

It is easy to say they make being young look like hard work, but wasn't it always hard work, even if the medium of its difficultly was different? At least they are making a project of their lives, a measurable project that can be liked or commented upon.

There's no woodland or forest-like aspect but it does feel like the middle of something, and wisdom finally arrives, even if only as an awareness that inside the adult flesh cages lurk the exact same children.

The art of mid-life is surely always cloudier than the art of youth, as life itself gets cloudier.

That girl," tutted Alsana as her front door slammed. "Swallowed an encyclopedia and a gutter at the same time.

It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them.

Portnoy was not Roth and he was not real, but in him is enshrined a genuine Rothian freedom, created by Roth, once impossible, now fully realized, a freedom which anyone can now easily access.

I couldn't help but notice the placidity of a small female household. In Tracey's home, disappointment in the man was ancient history: they never really had any hope in him, for he had almost never been at home.

Rightfully she should have been fearful of life. Instead she was recklessly bold.

Portnoy was not Roth and he was not real, but in him is enshrined a genuine Rothian freedom, created by Roth, once impossible, now fully realized, a freedom which anyone can now easily access. You don't even have to read the book: you are already living in the world that Portnoy touched and changed.

I read this line about love: Without it, life is just 'doing time' I don't think she intended by this only romantic love, or familial love or really any kind of love in particular. At least, I read it in the Platonic sense: Love with a capital L, and ideal form and essential part of the universe.

I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I'M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND—ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (3.81)

A great Austrian painter -- he lives in a forest in Hungary -- came by the apartment one day with his daughters, both red-headed with pigtails, pale-faced, silent. They wore the kind of clothes you can't buy in any shop, you have to get them delivered direct from the turn of the century.

And were they still like that, she wondered--these new girls, this new generation? Did they still feel one thing and do another? Did they still only want to be wanted? Were they still objects of desire instead of--as Howard might put it--desiring subjects?

What could she know about the waves of time that simply come at a person, one after the other? What could she know about life as the temporary, always partial, survival of that process?