The Fraud

by Zadie Smith

whose life’s work was summarized within as ‘generally dull, except when it is revolting’.

Now he has surprised us all and gone to Italy. He says he is almost 25 and must see beauty and write.

I’m a writer and I’ve no intention of being anything else.

The day is fled – and yet I saw no sun, And now I live – and now my life is done!

this tall, resolute woman, carrying three bags without help, needed no one and nothing. She hadn’t counted on the pleasure of being needed.

The strange thing about good people, Eliza had noticed, was the manner in which they saw that same quality everywhere and in everyone, when in truth it is vanishingly rare.

The truth was he dreaded conflict: he only really knew how to be wounded.

‘I do not advise you to enter upon a literary career’

From such worn cloth and stolen truth are novels made.

There are easy, self-serving truths, after all. And difficult, generous lies.

If he knew what I knew he would feel as I do was a formula she repeated to herself often, in order to maintain her sanity.

‘“It is better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.”

There was a bracketed place in her brain where things were both true and not true simultaneously. In this same space one could love two people. Live two lives. Escape and be at home.

To every thing there is a season.

She who had worn no masks and was therefore almost impossible to understand.

A knowledge of life is the least enviable of all species of knowledge, because it can only be acquired by painful experience.

What can we know of other people? How much of the mystery of another person could one’s own perspicacity divine?

What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daisies, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires filling. With things like angry letters to The Times.

There are always so many things to attend to, but when the void opens up there is only the void.

Nowadays, she only bit her tongue, like every other woman she had ever known.

The dead stay where they are, at least. More join them, but that is the only change.

As long as we profess to believe that two people may happily – or feasibly – invest all love and interest in this world solely in one another, till death do them part – well, then life, short as it is, will continue to be a human comedy, punctuated by tragedy.

We are only ideas to them, she wrote, at the top of a page.

Why the Sisyphean task of breakfast, lunch and dinner, made and cleared and made again? What was the point of it all?

“We never see ourselves – never do and never did – and I suppose we never shall.”

These boys can find an heiress in a haystack! They know which side a lady is buttered!’

One lifetime was not enough to understand a people and the words they used and the way they thought and lived.

Then again, children are sometimes a bitter harvest.

But even this idea – that he had such a thing as ‘days’ and hopes that might take place within them – turned out to be presumption.

I know I shall die for it, but my children shall be free.

he felt glad then that he had chosen a woman and not a girl, and one who also felt she did not belong, and therefore did not feel the complacent caution of those who have always been safely rooted.

‘universal suffrage’ – if the universe excluded women

Ye are many, they are few

A person is a bottomless thing!

We mistake each other. Our whole social arrangement a series of mistakes and compromises. Shorthand for a mystery too large to be seen. If they knew what I knew they would feel as I do! Yet even once one had glimpsed behind the veil which separates people, as she had – how hard it proves to keep the lives of others in mind! Everything conspires against it. Life itself.

How could a woman ever improve when fenced in on all sides by contempt?

she thought that the only thing more obscure, to William, than the motivations of other people, were his own:

Now that she was old, kindness seemed to her to be the only thing that really mattered. The only truly attractive quality.

She had never been to Italy – she had never been anywhere – and felt grateful for these local imitations.

(How like a novelist! thought Mrs Touchet. How he lies to tell the truth!)

Bookended by two infinities of nothing, she and William had shared almost identical expanses of being.

He was the kind of man who felt obliged to tell the truth at all times, no matter how uncomfortable this might prove for others. She hated people like that.

She wished that life’s pages could be flicked forward as in a novel, to see if what followed was worth attending to in the present.

New fences went up, sometimes walls, sometimes battlements.

Human error and venality are everywhere, churches are imperfect, cruelty is common, power corrupt, the weak go to the wall! What in this world can be relied on?

Was this, then, to be freedom?

The three of them stood in place for one of those strange, attenuated silences, perhaps unique to England, in which a conversation seems like a thing no one has ever been able to achieve, no, not since the dawn of creation.

Forward. Ever forward. More and bigger. Humanity was to be ‘advanced’, agriculture perfected, efficiency made only more efficient.

In London, Sir, the people are uncommonly interesting!’

Better to “take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them”.