606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals – that they can’t help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.

A dream was a house your brain made without your permission, precisely to preserve memories and experiences and wayward impulses for all eternity, even the dead ones that only caused you pain, the ones from which you most wanted to be free.

When I was 21, I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for ‘The Simpsons’ who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.

We did not desire or dread the boys in themselves, we only desired and dreaded being wanted or not being wanted.

Then they had gone outside, onto the steps, where a breeze lifted secondhand confetti.

There’s never any knowing – how am I to put it? – which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it for ever. – E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread.

Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money.

I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis’s essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn’t sound like me.

Still starving themselves, still reading women’s magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can’t be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything.