606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

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

That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made.

[He] looked troubled, for he had strayed too far from small talk right to the center of things--it happened more and more these days--and now must try to return to the things that didn't matter.

Don't confuse honours with achievement.

In that huge game of musical chairs, I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth—it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up.

Back then, we were all still willing to take the “risk,” if “risk” is the right word to describe entering into the lives of others, not merely in symbol but in reality.

These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained.

When my little group get together, if we disagree about something, we can sort it out. Example: Mohona Hossain hates Divargiit Singh. Hates all his movies. Hates him with a passion. She likes that other fool with the eyelashes like a lady! But we compromise. Never once have I burned a single video of hers.

I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it.... I should be loving sculpture! But I have not gone deeply into sculpture. Instead, having been utterly insensitive to sculpture, I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space.