Quotes from Zadie Smith

If my dad hadn't died young? No way I'd be here. It's the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks—the bloody Irish. That's our secret fucking strength.

L]ook, of course I know you and your family have beliefs,' began Howard uneasily, as if 'beliefs' were a kind of condition, like oral herpes.

Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberation — as cathartic as it may feel. Liberation is liberation: the recognition of somebody in everybody.

Time is compressing for the mother, she has a short distance left to go. She means to squeeze the past into a thing small enough to take with her. It's the daughter's job to listen. She's no good at it.

Bong country is beautiful. Lush green forest, a sweet breeze. There are pygmy hippopotamuses here and monkeys; a sense of Liberia's possibilities. Rich in natural resources, cool in the hills, hot on the beach.

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

I am a citizen as well as an individual soul and one of the things citizenship teaches us, over the long stretch, is that there is no perfectibility in human affairs.

I'm as liberal as the next person', complained Alsana, once they were alone. 'But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.

Please. Do me this one, great favor, Jones. If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home—if you, if we, get back to our respective homes—if ever you hear anyone speak of the East," and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, "hold your judgment. If you are told 'they are all this' or 'they do this' or 'their opinions are these,' withhold your judgment until all the facts are upon you.

Und allmählich glaube ich, dass Geburtsorte Zufälle sind, dass alles ein Zufall ist. Aber wenn du das glaubst, wohin kannst du dann noch? Was machst du dann? Was ist dann überhaupt noch wichtig? Während Samad mit verstörtem Blick diese Dystopie beschrieb, merkte Irie beschämt, dass das Land der Zufälle sich für ihre Ohren wie das Paradies anhörte. Wie Freiheit.

This realm of Pauline's--the realm of the so sad--is immutable and inevitable, like hurricanes and tsunamis. No particular angst is attached to it. Normally, this is bearable; today it is obscene. So sad is too distant from Pauline's existence, which is only disappointing. It makes disappointing look like a blessing. This must be why news of it is always so welcome, so satisfying.

Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do "something," that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I'm not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator.

what was that horrible late twentieth-century tautology? Proactive. More proactive in the face of the future.

this light was something else again. It buzzed and held you in its heat, it was thick, alive with pollen and insects and birds, and because nothing higher than one story interrupted its path, it gave all its gifts at once, blessing everything equally, an explosion of simultaneous illumination. "What

But these people _announced_ their madness . . . they flaunted their insanity, they weren't half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it.

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.

Nine SPEAKING IN TONGUES The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

Poverty is not just a headline, my love, it's a lived reality, on the ground—and education is at the heart of it." "I

At her back a Madonna, fashioned of jet limewood. The Madonna holds a mammoth baby in swaddling clothes. The Christ Child it says on the sign, his arms stretched out at either side, his hands big with blessing it says on the sign, but to Leah there seems no blessing in it. It looks more like accusation. The baby is cruciform; he is the shape of the thing that will destroy him. He reaches out for Leah. He reaches out to stop any escape, to the right or to the left.

The principles of Christianity and Sod's Law (also known as Murphy's Law) are the same: Everything happens to me, for me.

Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.

In Archie's experience anything with a long memory holds a grievance and a pet with a grievance (that time you got the wrong food, that time you bathed me) just isn't what you want.