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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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Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Things
Love
People
Divorce
Taking
Longer

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Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamental
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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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I am very selfish, really. I lived for love.
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An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply
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Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
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The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.
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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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I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.
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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.
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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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I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.
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I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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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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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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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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