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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Tell
Routinely
Time
Greetings
Love
Deserves
Cards
Clean
Deserve
Everybody
Water
Greeting

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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
Zadie Smith
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What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half.
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It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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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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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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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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The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
Zadie Smith
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It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
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When I was 13, I really used to skip down the street, happy in thinking, Oh, well, someone's suffering pain in order for me to feel this pleasure.
Zadie Smith
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Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.
Zadie Smith
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
Zadie Smith
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(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)
Zadie Smith
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To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.
Zadie Smith
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
Zadie Smith
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The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith
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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
Zadie Smith
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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
Zadie Smith