Top 15 Zadie Smith Quotes

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

So we have to be a bit more, I mean, military about it, like plan.

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas—it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone.

[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.

[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.

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

In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.

He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

He traced the genealogy of the feeling

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

It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love.

A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.

The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.

His death is like the soft down on the back of your hand, passing unnoticed in the firmest of handshakes, though the slightest breeze makes every damn one of the tiny hairs stand on end.

Because this is the other thing about immigrants: they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.