Quote

Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Need
Vulnerability
Needs
Ring
Something
Empathy
Always
Rings
Things
Weakness
Stronger
Exploited
Weak
Desperation
Protect
Fence

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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
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People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
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He traced the genealogy of the feeling.
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Full stories are as rare as honesty.
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Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?
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It's got two aspects. The bit that involves the public life I could not really tolerate and cannot really tolerate. I just can't get used to the idea of being somebody unreal in people's minds. I can't live my life like that.
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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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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
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The belief that consciousness extends beyond death is surely to put more belief in the permanence of self, not less. That seems to me a comfort that you're allowing yourself.
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He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
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As far as I'm concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.
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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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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
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Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?
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