Quote

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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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Least
Signify
Beauty
Infection
Suspect
Word
Suspects
Would
Hidden
Like
Skin
Skins
Looked
Belch

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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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.
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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.
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...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
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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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It was a kiss from the past.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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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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I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.
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You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
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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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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
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I don't ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
Zadie Smith
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
Zadie Smith