Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable.
Zadie Smith
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Zadie Smith
Age: 48
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Ability
Removing
Society
Retain
Family
Beard
Past
Fake
Women
Generally
Back
Ancient
Unhook
Men
Leave
Discreetly
Like
Changed
Unrecognizable
More quotes by Zadie Smith
I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
Zadie Smith
It was a kiss from the past.
Zadie Smith
This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
Zadie Smith
The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
Zadie Smith
The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
Zadie Smith
For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
Zadie Smith
You're a library of me.
Zadie Smith
I have a natural tendency to feel well about the world, I suppose, one way or another. But then there is the problem of pain. There are things like [Abraham] Lincoln's beloved little boy dying.
Zadie Smith
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
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?
Zadie Smith
Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
Zadie Smith
Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
Zadie Smith
There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.
Zadie Smith
Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
Zadie Smith
I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
Zadie Smith
The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
Zadie Smith
Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
Zadie Smith
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
It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I've always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.
Zadie Smith
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.
Zadie Smith
