Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission.

In Tracey’s home, disappointment in the man was ancient history: they had never really had any hope in him, for he had almost never been at home.

People are not poor because they’ve made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they’re poor.

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

Women often believe clothes will solve a problem,

But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain.

beauty was part of the boredom.

was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case. I thought you needed to think like that to achieve anything in this world.

that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing, for the more money a person had, then the more goodness—or potential for goodness—a person possessed.

What could she know about the waves of time that simply come at a person, one after the other? What could she know about life as the temporary, always partial, survival of that process?

in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my

here is the joy I’ve been looking for all my life.

The kind of girl who moved from group to group, neither welcomed nor despised, tolerated, and always eager to avoid confrontation.

“The problem with you is you’ve never known struggle!”

because when she ascended to the life of the mind everything that was not the life of the mind stopped existing for her.

No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.”

“There are so many different ways to be poor,”

some part of me always rebelled. Why did

I always wanted life—movement.

Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power—local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic—on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing,

The world is saturated in blood.

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

Some people can be bought, some people can smile in the face of other people they do not love, just to gain advantage.