Zadie Smith Quotes

He didn't get depressed, but he managed this not by looking away but by looking closely, attending to each logical step in any particular problem, so that the problem itself filled all available menta...

Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity.

The river split this finger of land in half throughout its length, and the airport was on the other side.

They were married before they were friends, which is another way of saying:Their marriage was the occasion of their friendship.They were married before they noticed many small differences in backgroun...

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18.

All I write is, to me, sentimental. A book which doesn’t leave people either happier or better than it found them, which doesn’t add some permanent treasure to the world, isn’t worth doing… This is my...

But dying is no easy trick. And suicide can't be put on a list of Things To Do in between cleaning the grill pan and leveling the sofa leg with a brick. It is the decision not to do, to un-do; a kiss...

And even before he said it, he wondered why he had to, why he felt so malevolent this evening.

Maybe a certain kind of ignorance was the condition. Into the pure nothingness of my non-knowledge something sublime (an event?) beyond (beneath?) consciousness was able to occur.

You are never stronger, thought Samad as approached the doctor, than when you land on the other side of despair.

He'd turned to me, red-faced, and asked: 'If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?

You’re lucky that you find life so easy, Felix. You’re lucky that you’re happy, that you know how to be happy, that you’re a good person- and you want everyone to be happy and good because you are, an...

This iswhat divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love

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 it’s my sense that no matter how many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is the family is always an event of some vi...

في بنات الجيل الجديد، هل ما زلن يردن أن يكن مرغوبات بهذه الشدة؟هل ما زلن يجوعن أنفسهن، وما زلن يقرأن المجلات النسائية التي تكره النساء بمنتهي الوضوح، وما زلن يقطعن أنفسهن بسكاكين صغيرة في أماكن بعيدة...

Together we entered this new space that now opened up between people, a connection with no precise beginning or end, that was always potentially open, and my mother was one of the first people I knew...

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 desir...