Top 300 Zadie Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 7

151. “But dying is no easy trick. And suicide can’t be put on a list of Things To Do in between cleaning the grill pan and leveling the sofa leg with a brick. It is the decision not to do, to un-do; a kiss blown at oblivion. No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It is for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men.”

— Zadie Smith

152. “Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

154. “I was fourteen: the world was pain.”

— Zadie Smith

155. “English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life – it changed the trajectory of my life.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

157. “A tap runs fast the first time you switch it on.”

— Zadie Smith

158. “If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister.”

— Zadie Smith

159. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

160. “If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.”

— Zadie Smith

161. “It just goes to show,’ said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, “you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.”

— Zadie Smith

162. “When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don’t experience your self as “natural” or “inevitable” – as so many other people seem to do – and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages. Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature.”

— Zadie Smith

163. “And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems some long, dirty lie... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?”

— Zadie Smith

164. “13.5 Mrs. Wolfe asks whether Mr. Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands. 13.6 Mr. Iqbal infers that, considering Susan’s academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.”

— Zadie Smith

165. “It’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.”

— Zadie Smith

166. “She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time for anything else.”

— Zadie Smith

167. “She loved you in the morning because the day was new.”

— Zadie Smith

168. “English writing tends to fall into two categories – the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there’s definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.”

— Zadie Smith

169. “She struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experiences the profound isolation and loenliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world.”

— Zadie Smith

170. “The choices a writer makes within a tradition – preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme – constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.”

— Zadie Smith

171. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

172. “Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.”

— Zadie Smith

173. “I wouldn’t write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it’s a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.”

— Zadie Smith

174. “You’re a library of me.”

— Zadie Smith

175. “Don’t we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.”

— Zadie Smith

176. “People aren’t poor because they make bad choices. They make bad choices because they’re poor.”

— Zadie Smith

177. “A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.” “For.”

— Zadie Smith

178. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

179. “It’s a funny thing about rap, that when you say ‘I’ into the microphone, it’s like a public confession. It’s very strange.”

— Zadie Smith

180. “I’m not sure if you’re the person for me any more.”

— Zadie Smith

181. “I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy’s screwy – cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad.”

— Zadie Smith

182. “All day long I can look forward to a popsicle.”

— Zadie Smith

183. “She could not do distress. Anger was so much easier. And quicker and harder and better. If I start crying, I’ll never stop –you hear people say that; Kiki heard people say it all the time in the hospital. A backlog of sadness for which there would never be sufficient time.”

— Zadie Smith

184. “Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition – it’s something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you’re still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There’s no proper term for it – original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.”

— Zadie Smith

185. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

186. “We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over us. One.”

— Zadie Smith

187. “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”

— Zadie Smith

188. “That there might be any practical divergence between my mother’s situation and her own did not seem to occur to Aimee, and this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewing the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality.”

— Zadie Smith

189. “Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones, who are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse still, who are given their big break only to come in on cue and die a death right there, center stage, for all to see.”

— Zadie Smith

190. “Like most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns.”

— Zadie Smith

191. “The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity – and to time itself.”

— Zadie Smith

192. “This was one of the little ways in which he said sorry. They were meant to add up each day.”

— Zadie Smith

193. “If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out.”

— Zadie Smith

194. “That feeling. That’s the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made.”

— Zadie Smith

195. “Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts;... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.”

— Zadie Smith

196. “It’s a question of what love gives you the right to do.”

— Zadie Smith

197. “Happy is the novelist,” claims Nabokov, “who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.”

— Zadie Smith

198. “He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.”

— Zadie Smith

199. “White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.”

— Zadie Smith

200. “Back then, we were all still willing to take the “risk,” if “risk” is the right word to describe entering into the lives of others, not merely in symbol but in reality.”

— Zadie Smith