Top 300 Zadie Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.”

— Zadie Smith

254. “Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.”

— Zadie Smith

255. “Archie says -Science- the same way he says -Modern-, as if someone has lent him the words and made him swear not to break them.”

— Zadie Smith

256. “The thing I feared was no longer my parents’ authority over me but that they might haul out into the open their own intimate fears, their melancholy and regrets.”

— Zadie Smith

257. “I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.”

— Zadie Smith

258. “Yes, sometimes it’s the strangers that sustain you.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

260. “I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age.”

— Zadie Smith

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

— Zadie Smith

262. “Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating, your conception of reality.”

— Zadie Smith

263. “I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.”

— Zadie Smith

264. “As far as I’m concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.”

— Zadie Smith

265. “This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody’s world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn’t feel you could call people. They didn’t feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons?”

— Zadie Smith

266. “I couldn’t afford to be offended.”

— Zadie Smith

267. “Beggars cannot be choosers.”

— Zadie Smith

268. “But I was so much older then,” sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, “I’m younger than that now.”

— Zadie Smith

269. “The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics.”

— Zadie Smith

270. “Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her. He has always denied this.”

— Zadie Smith

271. “Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And.”

— Zadie Smith

272. “If she was more curt with her own family than a homeless man this only suggested that generosity was not an infinite quantity and had to be employed strategically where it was most needed.”

— Zadie Smith

273. “Novels are what I know, and the novel door in my personality is always open.”

— Zadie Smith

274. “Thirty years – almost all of them really happy. That’s a lifetime, it’s incredible. Most people don’t get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it’s over...”

— Zadie Smith

275. “Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.”

— Zadie Smith

276. “I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end – we are not our parents and they are not us – my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years... whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face.”

— Zadie Smith

277. “Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a selection of scented erasers. Time is not what it is but how it is felt, and Zora felt no different.”

— Zadie Smith

278. “As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.”

— Zadie Smith

279. “She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.”

— Zadie Smith

280. “Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.”

— Zadie Smith

281. “He’d turned to me, red-faced, and asked: ‘If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?”

— Zadie Smith

282. “I couldn’t imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.”

— Zadie Smith

283. “The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.”

— Zadie Smith

284. “You’re next. It’s the next thing. Next stop Kilburn Station. The doors fold inwards, urban insect closing its wings.”

— Zadie Smith

285. “Experience rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. Writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pout it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance.”

— Zadie Smith

286. “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.”

— Zadie Smith

287. “How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably?”

— Zadie Smith

288. “But it’s my sense that no matter how many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is “the family” is always an event of some violence. It’s only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.”

— Zadie Smith

289. “He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies.”

— Zadie Smith

290. “But there have always been these people for whom rap language is more scandalous than the urban deprivation rap describes.”

— Zadie Smith

291. “But equally you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.”

— Zadie Smith

292. “We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be.”

— Zadie Smith

293. “When in the presence of a child, get on the floor.”

— Zadie Smith

294. “Then they had gone outside, onto the steps, where a breeze lifted secondhand confetti.”

— Zadie Smith

295. “Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money.”

— Zadie Smith

296. “War transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence. Strange inversions proliferate.”

— Zadie Smith

297. “But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty.”

— Zadie Smith

298. “Cigarettes took them to medals, which took them to guns, which took them to radios, which took them to jeeps. By midnight, Samad had won three jeeps, seven guns, fourteen medals, the land attached to Gozan’s sister’s house, and an IOU for four horses, three chickens and a duck.”

— Zadie Smith

299. “What was amazing about the apartments of long-standing adults was the accumulation of incidental texture. Not: I went and bought this lamp and this poster so I would have a lamp and a poster to furnish my life. But just stuff, so much stuff everywhere, somehow the consequence of a certain amount of time on earth.”

— Zadie Smith

300. “I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it.”

— Zadie Smith