Zadie Smith Quotes

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.

You always wanted to make it clear you weren't like the rest of us. You're still doing it.

But to me, an exercise in style is not a superficial matter – our lives are also an exercise in style.

He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire. The kind of talk that only increases it.

The thinnest covering of luck was on him like fresh dew. While he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes shit happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie.

You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, 'Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.' Now how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll—then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

The more blessed she felt on earth, the more rarely she turned to heaven.

His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out.

You don't have favorites among your children but you do have allies.

..and the devil won another easy hand in God's poker game.

[Q:] What moves you most in a literary work?
[A:] Ingenuity, honesty, perversity, bravery and — I must admit — natural talent. I feel the same wonder at a brilliant debut as I do watching Simone Biles doing her back flips.

[Q:] What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
[A:] the writers that meant most to me: Alice Walker, Roald Dahl, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Noel Streatfeild, Andrew Salkey, L. Maud Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott. Toni Morrison because of The Black Book, which she edited — and I read, at a very delicate age, 9 or 10. But C. S. Lewis above all.

Ryan's freckles were a join-the-dot's enthusiast's wet dream.

… and catholics give out forgiveness at the same time politicians give out promises and whores give out.

This is what divorce is: Taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.