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- You look fine. - Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Look
Girls
Self
Except
Looks
Protect
Right
Wouldn
Tugging
Men
Fine
Dreaded
Knew
Disgust
Girl
Sadly
Able
Disgusting

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
Zadie Smith
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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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You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality.
Zadie Smith
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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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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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For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.
Zadie Smith
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The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
Zadie Smith
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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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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
Zadie Smith
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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
Zadie Smith
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
Zadie Smith
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Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.
Zadie Smith
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I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
Zadie Smith
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Zadie Smith
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
Zadie Smith
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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.
Zadie Smith
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And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
Zadie Smith
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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
Zadie Smith
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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
Zadie Smith
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Novels and stories are sometimes very complex staging grounds to say, in fact, very simple things. Things impossible to say otherwise because they are repeated in so many exploitative contexts - adverts and TV shows and political speeches.
Zadie Smith