Zadie Smith citations

Page 2

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“You're a library of me.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”