606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

More silence; children’s silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.

She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she’d ever meant by the word.

A reality shaped around your own desires – there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: ‘How can I do it?’

I love to dance, and sing – in the shower, not in public. Im too old to go raving, but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing – dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.

I remember there was always a girl with a secret, with something furtive and broken in her, and walking through the village with Aimee, entering people’s homes, shaking their hands, accepting their food and drink, being hugged by their children, I often thought I saw her again, this girl who lives everywhere and at all times in history, who is sweeping the yard or pouring out tea or carrying somebody else’s baby on her hip and looking over at you with a secret she can’t tell. It.

You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can’t cross.

But the lesson I take from this is not that the lives in that novel were illusory but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.

I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space.