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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.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Human
Female
Humans
Pride
Even
Proud
Love
Either
Genetics
Impossible
Accidents
Experience
Necessarily
Part
Active
Find
Shame

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The past is always tense, the future perfect.
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
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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.
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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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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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Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?
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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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The young people have a phrase for this now, which is slay in your lane. That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
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A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
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Where I come from, said Archie, a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her. Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean, said Samad tersely, that it is a good idea.
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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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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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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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The novel leads you places that you never could have gotten to otherwise.
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Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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Cambridge was a joy. Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.
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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death. Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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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