606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt – something is gained but something is lost.

They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world – and most recently in America – the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.

The vision Marcia Blake had of these people, and had passed onto her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behaviour? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: ‘To give them no excuse.

I didn’t understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom.

On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can’t. On both occasions, the man breathes.

Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if he starts burning other people’s things, then he loses something sacred also. Everyone gets what’s coming, sooner or later.

I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I’m not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human – I only love to be so.

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

Did all friendships – all relations – involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power?