Keisha Blake, whose celebrated will and focus did not leave her much room for angst, watched her friend ascend to the top deck in her new panda-eyed makeup and had a mauvais quart d'heure, wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television.
Zadie SmithStichwörter: books television personality
Don't live in a way that makes you feel dead.
Zadie SmithWe are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Zadie SmithStichwörter: love white-teeth
Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have cost a million pounds. Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.
....The charming tale of benign state intervention described above is now relegated to the land of fairy tales: not just naïve but actually fantastic. Having one’s own history so suddenly and abruptly made unreal is an experience of a whole generation of British people, who must now wander around like so many ancient mariners boring foreigners about how they went to university for free and could once find a National Health dentist on their high street.
A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.
Zadie SmithStichwörter: libraries library britain
Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources.
Zadie SmithStichwörter: life lies work illusion resources
Perhaps sex isn't of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language.
Zadie SmithThe shit is *not* the shit (this was Mo's mantra,) the *pigeon* is the shit.
Zadie SmithThat kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.
Zadie SmithStichwörter: improvement rare
Cos if it's encyclopedias we've got enough, like, information... and if it's God, you've got the wrong house.
Zadie SmithStichwörter: god encyclopedias
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