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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Need
Portray
Great
Pleasing
Needs
Sympathetic
People
Thoughts
Dark
Often
Also
Women

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Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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You're a library of me.
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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
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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.
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
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Don't we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.
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For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
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Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over.
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I know a lot of people who read and think: George [Saunders] is so much fun. There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.
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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.
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They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.
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