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To me, these kind of everyday miseries act as a fatal disqualifier. My sunniest beliefs are basically contingent on the fact that my child is not dying of cancer right now.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Right
Cancer
Children
Misery
Kind
Everyday
Dying
Contingent
Child
Miseries
Belief
Fatal
Fact
Beliefs
Facts
Basically

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Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy.
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The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
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Don't confuse honours with achievement.
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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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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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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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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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Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It's the last stop on the nutso express.
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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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Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
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You say you want to talk, But you don't . You stonewall me.
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Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
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The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
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Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.
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Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.
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The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
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World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: 'How can I do it?'
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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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Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.
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He was bookish, she was not he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
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