White Teeth

by Zadie Smith

He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble: Beach. Raindrop: Ocean. Needle: Haystack.

Once the car started to fill with carbon monoxide, he had experienced the obligatory flashback of his life to date. It turned out to be a short, unedifying viewing experience, low on entertainment value, the metaphysical equivalent of the Queen’s Speech.

Madam Posterity stuck Archie down the arm of the sofa and forgot about him.

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.

Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity.

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt—something is gained but something is lost.

oleaginous

a parasite disguised as a philanthropist.

physiognomy

Never go to India, Sapper Jones, my dear friend, it is a place for fools and worse than fools. Fools, Hindus, Sikhs, and Punjabis.

It was awkward, an Indian telling an Englishman what to do—but somehow the quietness of it, the manliness of it, got them over it.

“I don’t eat it for the same reason you as an Englishman will never truly satisfy a woman.”

As a Muslim does not eat pork, and as an Indian knows how to please a woman!

In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.

rapscallions

Unlike blood relations, it is necessary here to earn one’s position in the community; it takes years of devoted fucking around, time-wasting, lying-about, shooting the breeze, watching paint dry—far more dedication than men invest in the careless moment of procreation.

Mickey had a very large head, almost as if his acne had demanded more room and received planning permission.

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.

And don’t ever underestimate people, don’t ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bombs fall on television, from listening to stifled sobs from the other end of a telephone line. Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.

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.

Strange as it sounds, there are plenty of people who refuse to meet the Lord with an Afro.

I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.”

Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation.”

Pulchritude—beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.

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.

When Irie stepped over the threshold of the Chalfen house, she felt an illicit thrill, like a Jew munching a sausage or a Hindu grabbing a Big Mac. She was crossing borders, sneaking into England; it felt like some terribly mutinous act, wearing somebody else’s uniform or somebody else’s skin.

Charlie Durham

It was his influence that made her a convert from Protestantism, and, like any convert, Mrs. Brenton took great pleasure in the conversion of others.

(oh, he loves her; just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly)—all

She was intrigued by the Bowden household. It was a place of endgames and aftertimes, fullstops and finales; where to count on the arrival of tomorrow was an indulgence, and every service in the house, from the milkman to the electricity, was paid for on a strictly daily basis so as not to spend money on utilities or goods that would be wasted should God turn up in all his holy vengeance the very next day.

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It’s the last stop on the nutso express. And Bowdenism, which was the Witnesses plus Revelation and then some, was as left field as they come.

She wore two pairs of panties at all times like a wary potential traffic victim; when Irie asked why, she sheepishly revealed that upon hearing the first signs of the Lord (approaching thunder, bellowing voice, Wagner’s Ring cycle), she intended to whip off the one closest to her and replace it with the outer pair, so that Jesus would find her fresh and odorless and ready for heaven.

It was several weeks before Irie understood that weathermen were the secular antithesis of Hortense’s life work, which was, essentially, a kind of supercosmic attempt to second-guess the Lord with one almighty biblical exegesis of a weather report.

Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts; Stones fans into Beatles fans, Tories into Liberal Democrats and back again, vinyl junkies to CD freaks. Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.

As rationalists are wont, Marcus abandoned rationalism for a moment in the face of the sheer wonder of the thing.

Reporters were factional, fanatical, obsessively defending their own turf, propounding the same thing day after day. So it had always been. Who would have guessed that Luke and John would take such different angles on the scoop of the century, the death of the Lord?

They call themselves followers of Islam, but they are nothing but thugs in a gang roaming Kilburn like all the other lunatics. And now they are sending out the—what are they called—folded-paper trouble.”

The sheer quantity of shit that must be wiped off the slate if we are to start again as new. Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more.

He made sure he did all these things perfectly, while Irie wept and dressed and left. He made sure he did all these things perfectly because he believed he was being watched by the great camera in the sky.

Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

A radical new movement where politics and religion were two sides of the same coin.

The Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation.

“KEVIN”

From the very beginning their extremist credentials were impeccable, FATE being to the RSPCA what Stalinism is to the Liberal Democrats.

“Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation”

You are just like your dad. Classic Iqbal. Can’t let things go. Can’t let sleeping cats die or whatever the fuck the phrase is.”

But it really doesn’t matter what we believe. It seems it won’t stop the man who thinks this life is guided by the life he thinks he had before, or the gypsy who swears by the queens in her tarot pack.

He wanted to offer a little reminder that the world is cruel and pointless, all human endeavor ultimately meaningless, and no advancement in this world worth making besides gaining God’s favor and an entry ticket into the better half of the afterlife.

But then, that had always been his talent; he had a mono-intelligence, an ability to hold on to a single idea with phenomenal tenacity, and he never found anything that suited it as well as the church of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

And nothing rational can fight faith.

The right to be right, to teach others, to be just at all times because God has ordained that you will be, the right to go into strange lands and alien places and talk to the ignorant, confident that you speak nothing but the truth. The right to be always right.

They don’t mind what their kids do in life as long as they’re reasonably, you know, healthy. Happy. And every single fucking day is not this huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be.

It’s Science.” 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.