Mike

“I don’t see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don’t see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can’t afford one.”
Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly.
“Children can be a kind of wealth,” he said.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“There are so many different ways to be poor,”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“The way he understood the world was so genuinely alien to me that it felt as if he occupied a parallel reality, which I didn't doubt was the real one, but which I couldn't 'speak to,' to use a favorite phrase of his.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over us. One”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time