"She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down."
— Zadie Smith

"The past is always tense, the future perfect"
— Zadie Smith

"It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, "Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me." Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll---then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. 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

"Any woman who counts on her face is a fool."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance. "
— Zadie Smith

"time is how you spend your love."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention. "
— Zadie Smith

"The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow."
— Zadie Smith (White Teeth)

"But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true."
— Zadie Smith

"You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies. "
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself."
— Zadie Smith

"'Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies-- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception."
— Zadie Smith

"They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"“Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I'm not saying that's what they really are. I'm just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you.”

-The Girl With Bangs"
— Zadie Smith

"USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management consultants won't tell you what they do until they've sunk five pints. I don't think anybody should give themselves air just because they don't have to hand over a pound of flesh every day at 5pm, and I don't think anyone should beat themselves with broken glass because they do. If you're an artist, well, good for you. Thank your lucky stars every evening and dance in the garden with the fairies. But don't fool yourself that you occupy some kind of higher moral ground. You have to work for that. Writing a few lines, painting a pretty picture - that just won't do it."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby."
— Zadie Smith (White Teeth: A Novel)

"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 (On Beauty)

"The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life."
— Zadie Smith

"- You look fine.
- Right. I look fine. Except I don't, said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. "
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"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. "
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"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 parte: she dressed it instead. "
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"Time is how you spend your love."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway."
— Zadie Smith (White Teeth)

"Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else. "
— Zadie Smith

"And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two loves, but this, too, was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel -- before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. After a few years, Levi arrived; space was made for him; it was as if he had always been. Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth. He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"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 (On Beauty)

"(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end?
(b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split?
(c) Is there a chance (and please check the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?

Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There's nothing to stop you---or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That's the real difference in a life."
— Zadie Smith

"The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport. "
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence. "
— Zadie Smith (The Autograph Man)

"Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time."
— Zadie Smith

"The greatest lie told about love is that it sets you free."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"(and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate as politicians give out promises and whores give out)"
— Zadie Smith (White Teeth)

"They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"’I think she’s just ADD,’ drawled Daisy.
‘Attention Dick Deficiency,’ said Zora, because she was extremely quick. ‘If it doesn’t have a dick, it’s basically deficient.’
Her little audience guffawed, pretending to a worldliness none of them had earned.
Ron gripped her chummily round the shoulders. ‘The wages of sin, etcetera, he said as they began to walk, and then, ‘Whither morality?’
‘Whither poetry?’ said Hannah.
‘Whither my ass?’ said Daisy, and nudged Zora for one of her cigarettes. 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 (On Beauty)

"This because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England's got to give."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"He was having an odd paternal rush, a blood surge that was also about blood and was presently humming through Howard's expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something like don't walk in front of cars take care and be good and dont hurt or be hurt and dont' live in a way that makes you feel dead and don't betray anybody or yourself and take care of what matters and please don't and please remember and make sure"
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon...and she's the mystère of jealousy, vengeance and discord, AND, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty and fortune."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day."
— Zadie Smith (White Teeth)

"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 (White Teeth)

"But the Alim laughed at this. 'And we know who they are. Allah have pity on the Anglicans! Samad, when the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intellect go away,' said the Alim, shaking his head. 'And one third of his religion.'"
— Zadie Smith

"She loved you in the morning because the day was new."
— Zadie Smith (The Autograph Man)

"But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true."
— Zadie Smith

"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 (White Teeth)

"... il tutto in diverse sfumature di grigio, celeste, verde scuro, perchè in base a una ricerca, questi sono i colori che la gente associa a "scienza e tecnologia" (il viola e il rosso evocano le arti, l'azzurro scuro sta a significare "qualità e/o merci scelte")..."
— Zadie Smith (White Teeth)

"Secondo l'esperienza di Archie, qualunque cosa dotata di memoria lunga mantiene i rancori, e non va per niente bene tenere animaletti domestici con ragioni di rancore (quella volta mi hai dato il cibo sbagliato, quell'altra mi hai fatto il bagno)."
— Zadie Smith (White Teeth)

"It's just the problem with those things, and what i've learnt is this: they're meant to be a shortcut to the ultimate... thing, the plane, or whatever you want to say it like, yeah? It's meant to be: here's your thirty quid or whatever, take me to higher consciousness, please. And it don't work that way, bro. You don't get the full benefit. You've got to work your way up that tree, meaning that that is an allegory which is saying: you can't just fly up to the branches. You get me?"
— Zadie Smith (The Autograph Man)