Quotes from Zadie Smith

Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.

Archie's marriage felt like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home, and finding they don't fit.

Like most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns.

Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl's hair. And I wish to God I could buy black hair products from black people for once. How we going to make it in this country if we don't make our own business?

progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.

This was one of the little ways in which he said sorry. They were meant to add up each day.

Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamentals.

We did not desire or dread the boys in themselves, we only desired and dreaded being wanted or not being wanted.

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

I was fourteen: the world was pain.

A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the purest definition of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right now. With every fresh crunch came the memory of previous crunches. She was permeated by familiar smells: wet woodchip and gravel around the base of the tree, newly laid turd underneath the cover of soggy leaves. She was moved by these sensations.

He wanted to meet her for the first time, over and over...He told himself the story that this was the great tragedy of his heart. The great tragedy of his heart was that it always needed to be told a story.

Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her. He has always denied this.

And underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere.

Faith is hard to achieve, easy to lose.

the truth is that not enough carriers of this virus have ever been willing to risk the potential loss of any aspect of their social capital to find out what kind of America might lie on the other side of segregation. They are very happy to blackout their social media for a day, to read all-black books, and educate themselves about black issues—as long as this education does not occur in the form of actual black children attending their actual schools.

Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and women, and finally they ruin themselves, accidentally, simply by getting old.

So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn't drag ancient history around like a ball and chain. So there were men who were not neck-deep and sinking in the quagmire of the past.

Because this is the other thing about immigrants ('fugees, émigrés, travellers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

Feedback) People become addicted to it. That's why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.

She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she'd ever meant by the word.

And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day.

Don't romanticise your 'vocation'. You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle'. All that matters is what you leave on the page.