Quote

He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Construction
Attracting
Cultural
Binary
Rose
Poles
Artifice
Called
Mutually
Political
Accumulation
Bookish
Nature
Theoretical
Circulating
Around
Biological
Constructions

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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.
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.
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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's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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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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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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Women often have a great need to portray themselves as sympathetic and pleasing, but we're also dark people with dark thoughts.
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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.
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Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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Sometimes Allah punishes and sometimes men have to do it, and it is a wise man who knows if it's Allah's turn or his own.
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Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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