jyiii

“Brute force outraged her, I think, because it was outside her beloved realm of language, and in response to it she really had nothing to say. Despite her revolutionary stylings I don't think my mother would have been very useful in a real revolution, not once the talking and the meetings were over and the actual violence began. There was a sense in which she couldn't quite believe in violence, as if it were, in her view, too stupid to be real. I knew--from Lambert only--that her own childhood had been full of violence, emotional and physical, but she rarely referred to it other than calling it "that nonsense," or sometimes "those ridiculous people," because when she ascended to the life of the mind everything that was not the life of the mind stopped existing for her. Louie as a sociological phenomenon or a political symptom or a historical example or simply a person raised in the same grinding rural poverty she'd known herself--a person whom she recognized, and I believe intimately understood--that Louie my mother could deal with. But the look of utter forsakenness on her face as the firemen led her to a far corner of the shed to show her the spot where the fire had been started, by someone who she knew personally, had tried to reason with, but who, despite this, had chosen to violently destroy what she'd lovingly created--this look is something I've never forgotten.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“The thing I feared was no longer my parents' authority over me but that they might haul out into the open their own intimate fears, their melancholy and regrets.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“Kinyoun believed in a future where scientists like him had rendered the concept of infectious disease moot, sparing the lives of innocent people. Instead, he had to face a present in which politics mattered more than honesty, and ignorance proved more powerful than medicine.”
― David K. Randall, Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague

“This was one of the little ways in which he said sorry. They were meant to add up each day.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty