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Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Shrinks
Sensibility
Language
Individual
Character
Everything
Friendships

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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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The nineties, ecstatic decade!
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[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.
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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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The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.
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I never bought the idea of individual genius from which the novel spews forth. It's always an act of curation.
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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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The idea that motherhood is inherently somehow a threat to creativity is just absurd.
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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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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
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It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.
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He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.
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I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
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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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Make sure the lubricant is unscented. Don't join fashionable 'schools of thought.' Read everything.
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Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.
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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
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Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
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The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport.
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