Zadie Smith Quotes
I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, "Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death." Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
Quotes to Explore
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Much to the chagrin of the staunchly secular among us, religion shows no sign of going away. Predictions of the demise of religion, faith, tradition - and even God - have consistently been proven wrong.
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I don't write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.
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Laughing and crying are very similar. They're an extreme response to life. You see it in children who start laughing hysterically.
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When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.
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The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we're a long, long ways from that.
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I've had hundreds of requests from journalists all over the world asking me to speak about Leicester, which is astonishing. It's captured the imagination.
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Once I have children, the kids come first. One thing at a time for me.
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I really do feel very lucky. I've had my kids and my relationships. I've set my life down - I'm in my house, and I'm alone with my children - and I'm at peace, and that's a really nice feeling. All I really want in my life is to maintain that.
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The Grimm collections were never intended for children. Not because kids were excluded, but because the division we make today of children's literature didn't exist then. The idea of protecting children from tales with violence didn't occur until the earlier part of the 19th century.
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One in four children being victimized? That's about seven children in every classroom. That's a significant proportion of the population.
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Some people think the world will end in 2012. I think we've got until 2014. I'm an optimist.
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Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the Second World War, a generation that dominated left-wing politics for almost a century.
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I would be the worst biologist in the world!
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The history of Israel-Palestine conflict cannot be understood without its underlying emotional meanders. The emotional frameworks of the loss of Palestine for the Arab-Islamic world touched deep scars that go back to the Crusades, symbolizing a proof of Arab-Islamic decay, political impotence, and perceived (British/French) betrayal and antagonism.
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There's a bunch of places in the world I haven't been to, 'cause I can only be on a plane for a little bit. I'm like, 'How long is it to get there? Two days on a plane? What? No.'
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If our hearts are ready for anything, we will spontaneously reach out when others are hurting. Living in an ethical way can attune us to the pain and needs of others, but when our hearts are open and awake, we care instinctively.
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The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
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Sure, I could have lots of people who do the cooking, the driving, all that jazz - but I would be unhappy. I wouldn't want my children raised that way.
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I didn't think that a career in theater was very realistic so I thought the only thing I could make money doing and still be somewhat artistic was, god help me, advertising.
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I entreat students of letters and other scholars to obey their masters in things good, to imitate them, and diligently apply themselves to letters for the sake of God's honour and their own salvation and that of other men.
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In the real world, children love me.
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Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.
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Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.
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I used to take that God's-eye view as a comfort when I was a child. I'd think, "Well, we couldn't find the world meaningful at all if it weren't for death." Of course, that is the smuggest and most intolerable of all perspectives because I'm not suffering from the death or the pain.
