Status Updates From Swing Time

“Some people can be bough, some people can smile in the face of other people they do not love, just to gain advantage. But I am not like you” oh Hawa you queen

Oh that's CRAZY

"For in my mind...---as perhaps it is for most young people---I was at the center of things, the only person in the world with true freedom...but everybody else in these scenes, all the subsidiary characters, belonged only in the compartments in which I had placed them. Fern eternally in the pink house, Lamine confined to the dusty paths of the village. What were they doing here, now, in my New York?" So accurate

"She did not struggle, as I did---as most women I knew did---to find ways to dress her body in the symbols, shapes, and signs of the age."

I love this wembledon/pizza place/race war scene so much. It reminds me of what I admire most about Zadie Smith's writing on a micro level. She engages with racial and ethnic identity and dynamics and tensions and relationships with such blunt humor and candidness and fearlessness, in a way I have yet to find in any other writer.