Zadie Smith Quotes

And it's time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings.

I'd decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.

She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time for anything else.

To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.

I want to stay still and to keep moving. I want this life and another.

Greeting cards routinely tell us that everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all of the time.

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand, but tell it.

My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.

Sacrifice was nine tenths of parenting.

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources.

Because choices need time, the fulness of time, time being the horizontal axis of morality - you make a decision and then you wait and see, wait and see.

But why think the more reasons there were to sin, the smaller the sin was?

One just has to look at the thing from a perspective that interests you personally.

The planet is finished with us, at this point -

I couldn't imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.

You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead.

This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.

As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues.

A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.

There were good and bad kinds of weakness in men, and she had come to the conclusion that the key was to know which kind you were dealing with.

That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.

Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him.

There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the route.

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.'

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.

My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world.