Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith

Novelist, Essayist

Zadie Smith is a British novelist known for her exploration of race, identity, and multiculturalism in works like 'White Teeth'.

Writing People Thinking Book Men Children
Born
October 25, 1975
Quotes
226
Rank
#5712

Quote collection

Zadie Smith quotes (page 5 of 12)

226 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Zadie Smith Novelist, Essayist
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"Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I'm not saying that's what they really are. I'm just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you."

Girl Fall Dark
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"World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'"

World Firsts Social Network
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"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."

Children Moving Islands
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"They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you."

Weed Growing Up Sibling
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"Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves."

Art Myth Western
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"You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal."

Mean Illegal Feels
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"Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half."

Baby Broken Giants
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"A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world."

Writing World Duty
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"It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing."

Odds Mountain Matter
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"He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind."

Heart Mind
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"13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan's academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable."

Weight Problems Might Academic
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"You don't come to live here 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."

Strong New York Ambition
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"Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express."

Crazy People Lasts
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"The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd."

Creativity Motherhood Ideas
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"Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches."

Simple Tv Shows Political
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"When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life."

Religious Writing Editors
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"The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience."

Giving Feelings Trying
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"He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice."

Rose Political Construction
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"The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise."

Novel
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"Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy."

Empathy Stronger Weakness
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