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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Must
Every
Survived
Sentence
Sentences
Friendship
Difficult
Order

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The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.
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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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I love to dance, and sing - in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing - dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.
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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
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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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You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune.
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You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
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Your mid-thirties is a good time because you know a fair amount, you have some self-control.
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.
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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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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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I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.
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All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
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