Quotes from Zadie Smith

Our mothers served as our balance, as our foot-rests.

I think great novels free us into an understanding that the tension between true/not true might in fact be liveable, might not have to be judged and immediately neutralized in the court of public opinion or in the oppressive conservatism of our social lives.

But the young man in his twenties is still in peak dreaming season: a thrilling time, an insecure time, even at the best of times. It should be a season full of possibility. Economic, romantic, technological, political, existential possibility. Yes, among all the various relativities to be considered, age is one that can't be parsed. The style of Cy - the style of all young people - now radically interrupted.

Finally, in the crowded third corner, stand the many people who feel rap is not music at all but rather a form of social problem. They have only one question to ask a rapper, and it concerns his choice of vocabulary. (Years pass. The question never changes.)

although entrapment in this case was only another word for love.

These designs came together very recently, and there's a haphazard, accidental quality to them. Resist the easy grooves they guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!

For the first time in months, she got dressed without attention to anything else except the basic practical covering of her body. She didn't do her hair. No make-up. No contact lenses. No heels. How much time she saved! How much more she would get done in this new life!

our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.

My childhood took place in the widening gap.

Her subject was pride, in all its forms.

Harry surely hadn't meant to tell his only son that you couldn't accept black people to develop mentally like white people do. He had meant to say : I love you, I love my grandchildren, please stay another day.

has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling sea-water to retrieve the salt – something is gained but something is lost. Though

the sheer beauty of the voice, its monumental dose of soul, the pain implicit within it, bypassed all my conscious opinions, my critical intelligence or sense of the sentimental

But asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form.

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.

It's only recently that I had any idea that how a person felt about libraries—not schools or hospitals, libraries—could even represent an ideological split. I thought a library was one of the few sites where the urge to conserve and the desire to improve—twin poles of our political mind—were easily and naturally united.

It was a garden of abundance and decay: the tomatoes were too ripe, the marijuana too strong, woodlice were hiding under everything.

In England, we once had an insulting name for such people: trimmers. In the mid-1600s, a trimmer was any politician who attempted to straddle the reviled middle ground between Cavalier and Roundhead, Parliament and the Crown; to call a man a trimmer was to accuse him of being insufficiently committed to an ideology.

for any daughter of hers was to do more than just survive—as my mother had—she was to thrive, learning many unnecessary skills, like tap dancing.

The only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving toward genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my argument by writing well").

The river split this finger of land in half throughout its length, and the airport was on the other side.

Nobody seemed sure if it was the last ferry. We waited. Time passed, the sky turned pink.

Peele gets to the core of what contemporary entitlement looks like—concern with one's personal rights combined with non-interest in one's duties