Top 300 Zadie Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “To think of a hate crime as the most uniquely heinous of crimes seems to lend it, in my mind, an undeserved aura of power. I’d rather something else. The police are investigating this crime as an acute abjection. The police are investigating this as a crime pitiful as it is appalling, pathetic as it is monstrous.”

— Zadie Smith

202. “And drunk men take dares like they take breaths.”

— Zadie Smith

203. “He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is “color-blind,” by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color – to look past it – to the “you” beneath. Not content with colonizing your country, he now colonizes your self.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

205. “My rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done.”

— Zadie Smith

206. “And then she reverses direction and heads straight for Willesden Bookshop, an independent shop that rents space from the council and provides – no matter what Brent Council may claim – an essential local service. It is run by Helen. Helen is an essential local person. I would characterize her essentialness in the following way: ‘Giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted.’ Important category.”

— Zadie Smith

207. “E in passato, si chiese Archie, la gente imbrogliava di meno? Era piu’ onesta, lasciava la porta di casa aperta, affidava i figli ai vicini, faceva visite agli amici, aveva il conto aperto con il macellaio?”

— Zadie Smith

208. “The story was the price you paid for the rhythm.”

— Zadie Smith

209. “She was that age. Whatever she said burst like genius into centuries of silence. Whatever she touched was the first stroke of its kind. Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but carved from certainty. Whatever she thought was the first time such a thought had ever been thunk.”

— Zadie Smith

210. “I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win?”

— Zadie Smith

211. “He is a black man. He is often thought of as a nothing, a cipher. But he has layers upon layers upon layers.”

— Zadie Smith

212. “Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.”

— Zadie Smith

213. “Great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They’d met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

215. “Nostalgia is a luxury.”

— Zadie Smith

216. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

217. “Faced with the same reality, we in the West tend to opt for a stiff drink instead. But people will insist upon shooting us sideways glances and saying things like, “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon!” and so we put down our glasses and sigh.”

— Zadie Smith

218. “You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.”

— Zadie Smith

219. “My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That’s no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.”

— Zadie Smith

220. “At least then, we have the satisfaction of a little short-term pleasure instead of a lifetime of feeling inadequate.”

— Zadie Smith

221. “Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist’s literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy – it’s always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.”

— Zadie Smith

222. “Libraries are not failing “because they are libraries.” Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.”

— Zadie Smith

223. “My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own.”

— Zadie Smith

224. “When everyone’s building a fence, isn’t it a true fool who lives out in the open?”

— Zadie Smith

225. “Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one.”

— Zadie Smith

226. “Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other’s pockets... one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to becoming uninvolved.”

— Zadie Smith

227. “Nobody can cast themselves out.”

— Zadie Smith

228. “We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn’t afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway. A.”

— Zadie Smith

229. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

230. “I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, “Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing – loads of Indian people.” To which you want to reply, “Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing – loads of white people.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

232. “I don’t keep any copies of my books in the house – they go to my mum’s flat. I don’t like them around.”

— Zadie Smith

233. “This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

235. “I’m most honest about writing when I’m talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.”

— Zadie Smith

236. “He traced the genealogy of the feeling.”

— Zadie Smith

237. “But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it’s about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.”

— Zadie Smith

238. “They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire.”

— Zadie Smith

239. “You can feel bad... I mean, that’s not illegal.”

— Zadie Smith

240. “To her credit, though, Trace didn’t lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman’s art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.”

— Zadie Smith

241. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

243. “If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. 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.”

— Zadie Smith

244. “A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

246. “Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity.”

— Zadie Smith

247. “But sometimes it’s like you just meet someone and you just know that you’re totally connected, and this person is, like, your brother – or your sister. Even if they don’t, like, recognize it, you feel it. And in a lot of ways it don’t matter if they do or they don’t see that for what it is – all you can do is put the feeling out there. That’s your duty. Then you just wait and see what comes back to you. That’s the deal.”

— Zadie Smith

248. “All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.”

— Zadie Smith

249. “My evidence – such as it is – is almost always intimate. I feel this – do you? I’m struck by this thought – are you?”

— Zadie Smith

250. “When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English Civil War, of French wines – I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?”

— Zadie Smith