606 Quotes by Zadie Smith

All day long I can look forward to a popsicle.

The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real world person called Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.

I don’t ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man’s question. I ask whom did I live for.

So I might say to her: look, the thing you have to appreciate is that we’d just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes – and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.

Sometimes I wonder if people don’t want freedom as much as they want meaning.

I knew my mother was in the process of becoming, or trying to become, “an intellectual,” because my father often threw this term at her as a form of insult during their arguments.

It is the most ridiculous country in the world, Bangladesh. It is God’s idea of a really good wheeze, his stab at black comedy.

The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation...

She was never home. Irie was stuck between a rock and a hard place, like Ireland, like Israel, like India.