Zadie Smith
Quotes
You don't have favorites among your children but you do have allies.
p. 167
His death is like the soft down on the back of your hand, passing unnoticed in the firmest of handshakes, though the slightest breeze makes every damn one of the tiny hairs stand on end.
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
p. 424
He traced the genealogy of the feeling
p. 179
In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
p. 398
It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love.
p. 54
He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
p. 225
A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.
p. 155
He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire. The kind of talk that only increases it.
Because this is the other thing about immigrants: they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
This is what divorce is: Taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
The thinnest covering of luck was on him like fresh dew. While he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of a tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes shit happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie.
