What interests me in [Lincoln in the Bardo] is a slight perverse balance between the sublime and the grotesque. Like you could have landed only on the sublime. But my argument is that the sublime couldn't exist without this other half. Zadie Smith More Quotes by Zadie Smith More Quotes From Zadie Smith 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. Zadie Smith female proud pride It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties. Zadie Smith concerned duty rights Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet. Zadie Smith disconnected internet computer We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time. Zadie Smith deserve-love water believe Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection. Zadie Smith infection skins should Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time. Zadie Smith deserve-love water cards 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 voice writing people …maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous….” - Zadie Smith Zadie Smith fake self friendly Life’s not a video game, Felix- there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over. Zadie Smith next-level games numbers We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. Zadie Smith who-we-are want writing When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. Zadie Smith data language character 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 new-year phones dream I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them. Zadie Smith opposites writing thinking The library was the place I went to find out what there was to know. It was absolutely essential. Zadie Smith library essentials knows Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable. Zadie Smith fake men past Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people. Zadie Smith sometimes people looks Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy. Zadie Smith empathy stronger weakness Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale. Zadie Smith errors politician artist Any woman who counts on her face is a fool. Zadie Smith fool faces Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead. Zadie Smith girl morning night
