Zadie Smith Quotes

“… the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.”

“Where I come from," said Archie, "a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her."
"Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean," said Samad tersely, "that it is a good idea.”

“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.”

“A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.”

“She loved you in the morning because the day was new.”

“This is what divorce is: Taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.”

“She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon… and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.”

“Time is how you spend your love.”

“The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”

“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.”

“In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.”

“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.”

“Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.”

“She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.”

“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.”

“Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.”

“Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.”

“She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.”

“… They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.”

“You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.”

“In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.”

“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.”

“Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.”

“But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution”

“I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.”

“Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.”

“The future's another country, man… And I still ain't got a passport.”

“Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.”

“The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.”

“Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.”

“We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.”

“I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.”

“It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy”

“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.”

“No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Becauseis one of the magical fantasy words likeandandthat have now passed into language.”

“Full stories are as rare as honesty.”

“She did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.”

“Perhaps sex isn't of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language.”

“Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.”

“Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison.”

“For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.”

“Each couple is its own vaudeville act.”

“You look fine.
- Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.”

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

“You're a library of me.”

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

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

“He was having an odd paternal rush, a blood surge that was alsoblood and was presently hunting through Howard's expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something like”

“Not everyone wants this conventional little life you’re rowing your boat toward. I like my river of fire. And when it’s time for me to go I fully intend to roll off my one-person dinghy into the flames and be consumed. I'm not afraid.”

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

“While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.”

“It was a kiss from the past.”

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

“We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.”

“Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.”

“Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself.”

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

“Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.”

“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.”

“Is there anything more likely to take the shine off an affair that when the lover strikes up a convivial relationship with the lovee's mother.”

“His death is like the soft down on the back of your hand, passing unnoticed in the firmest of handshakes, though the slightest breeze makes every damn one of the tiny hairs stand on end.”