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Zadie Smith Quotes

Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her most recent book is Swing Time, published in 2016.

✵ 25. October 1975  •  Other names ஸேடி ஸ்மித், زادی اسمیت, ज़ैडी स्मिथ
Zadie Smith photo

Works

White Teeth
White Teeth
Zadie Smith
On Beauty
On Beauty
Zadie Smith
NW
NW
Zadie Smith
White Teeth
White Teeth
Zadie Smith
On Beauty
On Beauty
Zadie Smith
NW
NW
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith: 81 quotes5 likes

Famous Zadie Smith Quotes

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Variant: A past tense, future perfect kind of night.
Source: White Teeth (2000)

“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.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

“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.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

“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.”

Zadie Smith book Swing Time

Source: Swing Time

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

Zadie Smith book The Autograph Man

Source: The Autograph Man

Zadie Smith Quotes about love

“I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth (2000)

“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.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

“Time is how you spend your love.”

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Unspecified edition, p. 424.
Source: On Beauty (2005)

“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.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

Zadie Smith Quotes about people

“Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Unspecified edition, p. 398.
Source: On Beauty (2005)

“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.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

White Teeth (2000)

Zadie Smith: Trending quotes

“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.”

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith Quotes

“You don't have favorites among your children but you do have allies.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Unspecified edition, p. 167.
On Beauty (2005)
Variant: You don't have favorites among your children but you do have allies.

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

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth (2000)
Context: You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, 'Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.' Now how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll—then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. 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.

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

Zadie Smith book The Autograph Man

Source: The Autograph Man

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Variant: Because this is the other thing about immigrants: they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
Source: White Teeth (2000)

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

“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.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

Zadie Smith book Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Source: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

“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”

Zadie Smith

“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.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

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

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

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

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith book NW

Source: NW

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

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

“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.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Unspecified edition, p. 225.
Source: On Beauty (2005)

“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.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

“Full stories are as rare as honesty.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

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

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

Zadie Smith book NW

Source: NW

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

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

Zadie Smith book NW

Source: NW

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

“Each couple is its own vaudeville act.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

“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.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

“You're a library of me.”

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith book NW

Source: NW

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

“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”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

“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.”

Zadie Smith book NW

Source: NW

“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?”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

Zadie Smith book The Autograph Man

Source: The Autograph Man

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

“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.”

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith book NW

Source: NW

“It was a kiss from the past.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

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

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

“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.”

Zadie Smith

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

Zadie Smith book The Autograph Man

Source: The Autograph Man

“Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

On Beauty

“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.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

White Teeth (2000)

“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.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

White Teeth (2000)

“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.”

Zadie Smith book The Autograph Man

The Autograph Man (2002)

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