"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."

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Source: Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith (2003). “The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003”, p.31, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

About the author

Zadie Smith

Novelist, Essayist

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

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"Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page."

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