606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

Here’s the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later. And then, twenty years after that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostalgia for a collective youth. Condemned cliques become halcyon “movements” annoying young men, august geniuses.

But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain. One.

But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it’s about 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. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.

It made me feel that I had to work very hard, but I’ve always felt I had to work very hard to get my own approval.

Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating, your conception of reality.

He had not seen her since that afternoon. And with the miracle that is male compartmentalization he had barely thought of her either.

I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. “You.

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It’s the last stop on the nutso express.

Nostalgia is a luxury.