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Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Something
Lincoln
Sublime
George
Ghost
Risk
Saunders
Changed
Bardo
Part
Grotesque
Great
Ghosts

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She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
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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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We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.
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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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…maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith
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Time is how you spend your love.
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I always remind myself that [ Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Simone] de Beauvoir didn't have children. And when you don't have children, it might be easier to believe that the child doesn't come with something.
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A lot of women, when they're young, feel they have very good friends, and find later on that friendship is complicated. It's easy to be friends when everyone's 18. It gets harder the older you get, as you make different life choices, as people say in America. A lot of women's friendships begin to founder.
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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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It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
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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 library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential.
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She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
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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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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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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.
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All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
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It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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