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And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Flower
Bloom
People
Millions
Appeared
Happened
Opens
Brings
Easy
Daily
Thought
Miracle
Might
Million
Interiority
Hard
Neither
Whereby
World

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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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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.
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It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
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Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
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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 novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
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Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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It was a kiss from the past.
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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.
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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 past is always tense, the future perfect.
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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
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The arena of women's lives is somewhat more intimate. If a woman goes out with an incredibly attractive man and they break up, that woman is not more attractive to men. It's completely irrelevant to them. That's an example of the way women's minds work.
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