Quotes from Zadie Smith

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. Unrecognizable.

When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.

I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.

Each couple is its own vaudeville act.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?

People don't settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.

Sometimes I wonder if people don't want freedom as much as they want meaning.

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.

this is real. This life. We're really here - this is really happening. Suffering is real. When you hurt people, it's real. When you fuck one of our best friends, that's a real thing and it hurts me.

You're a library of me.

He was having an odd paternal rush, a blood surge that was also about blood and was presently hunting through Howard's expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something like don't walk in front of cars take care and be good and don't hurt or be hurt and don't live in a way that makes you feel dead and don't betray anybody or yourself and take care of what matters and please don't and please remember and make sure

While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.

Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.

He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources.

He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.

We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

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

Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.

I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human—I only love to be so.

Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity.

and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)