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This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Woman
Living
Experience
Children
Work
Unadorned
Marks
Mark
Age

More quotes by Zadie Smith

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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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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.
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
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And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
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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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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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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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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
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'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn't it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
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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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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
Zadie Smith
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Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
Zadie Smith
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One thing you learn about the novel as a form is that it's always smarter than you are.
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Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
Zadie Smith
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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.
Zadie Smith