Quotes from Zadie Smith

He promised them a class that would challenge their own beliefs about the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called 'Art'. 'Art is the Western myth,' announced Howard, for the sixth year in a row, 'with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.

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

I couldn't imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.

They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up.

Getting anything out of my husband is like trying to squeeze water out when you're stoned.

The shit is *not* the shit (this was Mo's mantra,) the *pigeon* is the shit.

Cos if it's encyclopedias we've got enough, like, information... and if it's God, you've got the wrong house.

Libraries are not failing because they are libraries. Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.

Magical thinking makes you crazy — and renders everything possible.

The fundamental skill of all mothers—the management of time—was beyond her. She measured time in pages.

There were good and bad kinds of weakness in men, and she had come to the conclusion that the key was to know which kind you were dealing with.

Great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They'd met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.

A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.

He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is "color-blind," by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color—to look past it—to the "you" beneath. Not content with colonizing your country, he now colonizes your self

White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.

I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it.

Sometimes I wonder if people don't want freedom as much as they want meaning

Bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways. The idea that one should speak one's cultural allegiance first and the truth second (and that this is a sign of authenticity) is precisely such a deformation.

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can't cross.

They said, This might look like a war between men and women, but what this really is is the last siege of a ruling class. See Brett up there making that little bitch-baby face? See that? That's the face a baby makes when you try to take his rattle way. We've had many, many babies so we're familiar. America being the rattle in this analogy. He thinks he deserves to do whatever he wants with that rattle, and women are simply a subclause in that arrangement

This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.

There is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody

It's a question of what love gives you the right to do.