Quotes from Zadie Smith

Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting.

A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end - he will kill. Make no mistake. He won't let the new order roll over him without a struggle.

then after a few miles you arrived at a new idea, that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing, for the more money a person had, then the more goodness—or potential for goodness—a person possessed.

The shit is not the shit, the pigeon is the shit.

To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly opt out (by choice, by default) of the things they have embraced. We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own.

There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.

We don't always have to judge difference or categorize it or criminalize it. We don't have to take it personally. We can also just let it be.

The other cyclists used to take breaks to watch him do it. Lean their bikes against the incline and time him with the second hand of their wristwatches. 62.8 every time. That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.

to put it in the modern parlance, this is a re-run. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms spewed out to the old colonies in one tedious, eternal loop. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - something to do with that experience of moving West to East or East to West or island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round.

That there might be any practical divergence between my mother's situation and her own did not seem to occur to Aimee, and this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewing the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality.

The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity – and to time itself.

Forster] quotes approvingly from this discussion, from The Magic Flute [by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson] Lord Buddha was your gospel true? True and False. What was true in it? Selflessness and Love. What false? Flight from Life.

We are split people.

When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue. . . . the cosmic Zora emerges. . . . How can anybody deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me!

he] had become the bloke in the joke: the last man on earth

The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation...

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.

she was someone who lived in her own dreamscape, who presumed that everyone around her was at all times feeling exactly as she was.

But equally you can't fight for a freedom you've forgotten how to identify.

Unlike many others around this time, Joyce felt no shame about using the term 'middle class'. In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it's hard to say.)

And drunk men take dares like they take breaths.

But first the endgames. Because it seems that no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.