nadia | notabookshelf’s Reviews > White Teeth > Status Update

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

"The mouseness of the mouse seemed inescapable."

it is a woman who is a "lost soul" when she gets pregnant unmarried, it is her who should be saved. never a man, he can just go and live his life.

"I belive in the Responsibility of Intellectuals..." oh no no no no no no no, my girl, oh no

"She liked gay men. And they liked her. She had [...] amassed a little gay fan club at the university, [...] So Joyce couldn't be homophobic. But gay women... [...] She just didn't get it." - the same Educated White Woman. truly a well-rounded character!

as a white woman, my only real hope is that i will never ever become This Type of white Educated (tm) woman who thinks she knows everything about every culture she studied, a semester each, and exlaims how "sad" must be the ways of the people who are not like her. i'm physically cringing, this is very well-portrayed.

debate: "Never read what is old with a modern ear."

re: Archibald: "Maybe he just couldn't do it. Maybe he wasn't the type."

"you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find a correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It's a fairy tale!"

"The facts of disaster are the facts of their lives."