Sadhbh

“They were married before they were friends, which is another way of saying:
Their marriage was the occasion of their friendship.
They were married before they noticed many small differences in background, aspiration, education, ambition. (...)
Noting such differences, Leah was in some sense disappointed in herself that they did not cause real conflict between them. It was hard to get used to the fact that the pleasure her body found in his, and vice versa, should so easily overrule the many objections she had, or should have had, or thought she should have had.”
― Zadie Smith, NW

“Writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. And now, when I finish a long day of CNN-related fear and loathing mixed with eyeballing my own resolutely white screen, I do not crawl into bed with 500-page comic novels about “multicultural” London. I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis’s essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn’t sound like me.”
― Zadie Smith

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

“Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and women, and finally they ruin themselves, accidentally, simply by getting old.”
― Zadie Smith