Zadie Smith.

People often comment that I'm quietly very opinionated, like its a bad thing. What's wrong with knowing what I do and don't like?
Take reading. Reading is one of the freaking most awesome things you can do with your life. It's sensational when you discover a new writer or gain tremendous insight into the world through another's perceptions. Words are so powerful - they can bind us or uplift us or stupify or hurt us. People remember words - read or heard, indefinitely.
I just got Zadie Smith's new book "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays". I'm typing this and looking at it. I'm so excited to read it tomorrow- I'm saving it for a treat. Zadie Smith is one of my all-time favourite women of all time. I just adore her writing; it feels like listening to the wise words of a cherished older sister or girlfriend.
Here are some quotes from her different books, and some of her opinions.


"Any woman who counts on her face is a fool."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears - dissolution, disappearance. "
— Zadie Smith (White Teeth)

"time is how you spend your love."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception."
— Zadie Smith

"The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life."
— Zadie Smith

"And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared."
— Zadie Smith (On Beauty)

"She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence. "
— Zadie Smith (The Autograph Man)

"She loved you in the morning because the day was new."
— Zadie Smith (The Autograph Man)

"If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made."
— Zadie Smith (White Teeth)

"Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase "at the end of the day"--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, to the fundamentals."
— Zadie Smith (White Teeth)

"The past is always tense, the future perfect"
— Zadie Smith