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

“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

“She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time