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It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Nobody
Everybody
Rights
Point
Duties
Gotten
Concerned
Duty

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It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.' Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.
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I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
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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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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
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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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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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For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.
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The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimise that action.
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If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
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I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.
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I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.
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When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
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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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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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When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
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Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]
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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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