“Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.”
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.
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Zadie Smith 81
British writer 1975Related quotes
2010s, Speech at the Republican National Convention (July 20, 2016)
“It tells us the world is… deserving of reverence.”
with Betty Roszak, "Deep Form in Art and Nature" Alexandria 4, Vol.4 The Order of Beauty and Nature (1997) ed. David Fideler
Context: Our goal should not be to borrow from elsewhere, but to search among our own cultural resources, perhaps even in modern science and industrialism, for ways to restore art to the status it has always held in traditional societies as a form of knowledge.... art adds to what we learn from any combination of physics, biology, geology, and chemistry. It tells us the world is... deserving of reverence.
Speech in the House of Commons, March 22, 1944 "War Decorations" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1944/mar/22/war-decorations-and-medals#column_872.
The Second World War (1939–1945)
“(…) To see myself in everybody and everybody in myself most certainly is love.”
Love
Source: "I am That." P.91.
“Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance
Everybody thinks its true.”
Train In The Distance
Song lyrics, Hearts and Bones (1983)