Grand Union Quotes

“A dream was a house your brain made without your permission, precisely to preserve memories and experiences and wayward impulses for all eternity, even the dead ones that only caused you pain, the ones from which you most wanted to be free.”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“To the suffering person, suffering is solely suffering. It is only for others, as a symbol, that suffering takes on any meaning or purpose. No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil rights movement. They just shook, suffered, screamed, and died. Pain is the least symbolic thing there is.”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“What was amazing about the apartments of long-standing adults was the accumulation of incidental texture. Not: I went and bought this lamp and this poster so I would have a lamp and a poster to furnish my life. But just stuff, so much stuff everywhere, somehow the consequence of a certain amount of time on earth.”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“They said, This might look like a war between men and women, but what this really is is the last siege of a ruling class. See Brett up there making that little bitch-baby face? See that? That’s the face a baby makes when you try to take his rattle way. We’ve had many, many babies so we’re familiar. America being the rattle in this analogy. He thinks he deserves to do whatever he wants with that rattle, and women are simply a subclause in that arrangement”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“because America is the kind of bitch who turns anyone who truly cares about Her into a crazy person.”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“See what you've done there is you've transformed an act of the perpetrator into another person's being. I said, You don't say to a witch: the reason they're dunking you is because you're a witch. You say, the reason they're dunking you is these motherfuckers believe in witchcraft!”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“Blessed are those to whom music means that much.”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“I bumped into someone on Bleecker who was beyond the pale. I felt like talking to him so I did. As we talked I kept thinking, But you’re beyond the pale, yet instead of that stopping us from talking we started to talk more and more frantically, babbling like a couple of maniacs about a whole load of things: shame, ruin, public humiliation, the destruction of reputation—that immortal part of oneself—the contempt of one’s wife, one’s children, one’s colleagues, personal pathology, exposure, suicidal ideation, and all that jazz. I thought, Maybe if I am one day totally and finally placed beyond the pale, I, too, might feel curiously free. Of expectation. Of the opinions of others. Of a lot of things. “It’s like prison,” he said, not uncheerfully. “You don’t see anybody and you get a lot of writing done.”
If you’re wondering where he would be placed on a badness scale of one to ten, as I understand it he is, by general admission, hovering between a two and a three. He did not have “victims” so much as “annoyed parties.” What if he had had victims? Would I have talked to him then? But surely in that case, in an ideal world—after a trial in court—he would have been sent to a prison, or, if you have more enlightened ideas about both crime and punishment, to a therapeutic facility that helps people not to make victims of their fellow humans. Would I have visited him in prison? Probably not. I can’t drive, and besides I have never volunteered for one of those programs in which sentimental people, under the influence of the Gospels, consider all humans to be essentially victims of one another and of themselves and so go to visit even the worst offenders, bringing them copies of the Gospels and also sweaters they’ve knitted. But that wasn’t the case here. He was beyond the pale, I wasn’t. We said our good-byes and I returned to my tower, keeping away from the window for the afternoon, not being in the mood for either signs or arrows. I didn’t know where I was on the scale back then (last week). I was soon to find out. Boy, was I soon to find out. But right now, in the present I’m telling you about, I saw through a glass, darkly. Like you, probably. Like a lot of people.”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“bumped into someone on Bleecker who was beyond the pale. I felt like talking to him so I did. As we talked I kept thinking, But you’re beyond the pale, yet instead of that stopping us from talking we started to talk more and more frantically, babbling like a couple of maniacs about a whole load of things: shame, ruin, public humiliation, the destruction of reputation—that immortal part of oneself—the contempt of one’s wife, one’s children, one’s colleagues, personal pathology, exposure, suicidal ideation, and all that jazz. I thought, Maybe if I am one day totally and finally placed beyond the pale, I, too, might feel curiously free. Of expectation. Of the opinions of others. Of a lot of things. “It’s like prison,” he said, not uncheerfully. “You don’t see anybody and you get a lot of writing done.”
If you’re wondering where he would be placed on a badness scale of one to ten, as I understand it he is, by general admission, hovering between a two and a three. He did not have “victims” so much as “annoyed parties.” What if he had had victims? Would I have talked to him then? But surely in that case, in an ideal world—after a trial in court—he would have been sent to a prison, or, if you have more enlightened ideas about both crime and punishment, to a therapeutic facility that helps people not to make victims of their fellow humans. Would I have visited him in prison? Probably not. I can’t drive, and besides I have never volunteered for one of those programs in which sentimental people, under the influence of the Gospels, consider all humans to be essentially victims of one another and of themselves and so go to visit even the worst offenders, bringing them copies of the Gospels and also sweaters they’ve knitted. But that wasn’t the case here. He was beyond the pale, I wasn’t. We said our good-byes and I returned to my tower, keeping away from the window for the afternoon, not being in the mood for either signs or arrows. I didn’t know where I was on the scale back then (last week). I was soon to find out. Boy, was I soon to find out. But right now, in the present I’m telling you about, I saw through a glass, darkly. Like you, probably. Like a lot of people.”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“He had no lost thoughts. Last thoughts are for bourgeois Russian deathbeds, in comfortable townhouses, where false friends and colleagues take tea in the next room and ponder what vacancies and opportunities your death might afford them.”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“Brett had proved once again that whenever a young Brett is born in these United States, born with a dream, that dream can truly come true. Yes, sir, if your baby Brett really puts his mind to it -- if he believes, if he has faith, if he is a he, and if he is called Brett -- he can do whatever it is he puts his mind to, and that goes double for all you Troys, Kips, Tripps, Bucks and Chads.”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“I said, See what you've done there is you've transformed an act of the perpetrator into a characteristic of the target. You've turned one person's action into another person's being. I said, You don't say to a witch: the reason they're dunking you is because you're a witch. You say, the reason they're dunking you is these motherfuckers believe in witchcraft! Their whole society is based on it!”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“Finally, it was time to go. At the doorway he said, as if it had just occurred to him: "I don't understand how you can live here, and be an artist, among all this social noise and all of these people.”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“A great Austrian painter -- he lives in a forest in Hungary -- came by the apartment one day with his daughters, both red-headed with pigtails, pale-faced, silent. They wore the kind of clothes you can't buy in any shop, you have to get them delivered direct from the turn of the century.”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union

“It is easy to say they make being young look like hard work, but wasn't it always hard work, even if the medium of its difficultly was different? At least they are making a project of their lives, a measurable project that can be liked or commented upon.”
― Zadie Smith, Grand Union