On Beauty Zadie Smith Quotes & Sayings

For the fist time since she'd met him five years ago, Zander Duffield looked like a child acting the role of a Titan in a school play
instead of the Titan he actually was. — Suzanne Stroh

Everything is a part of destiny's plan and I believe true love awaits its destiny. — Sara Naveed

Lost in his thoughts he looked out from his shop at the shining loveliness of that first day of March. Opposite him, a little to the side, stood the eternal bridge, everlastingly the same; through its white arches could be seen the green, sparkling, tumultuous waters of the Drina, so that they seemed like some strange diadem in two colours which sparkled in the sun. — Ivo Andric

As fire's presence in our everyday lives has diminished, the social magnetism of the cook fire seems, if anything, to have only grown more powerful. — Michael Pollan

I didn't understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom. — Zadie Smith

Pulchritude
beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection. — Zadie Smith

Her beauty was not a sharp, cold commodity. She smelled musty, womanly, like a bundle of your favourite clothes... She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not (as with most of the girls Archie had run with in the past) like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it or when to just put it down. (~of Clara Bowden) — Zadie Smith

In place of negative falsification, we have nurtured, in the past thirty years, a new fetishization. Black female protagonists are now unerringly strong and soulful; they are sexually voracious and unafraid; they take the unreal forms of earth mothers, African queens, divas, spirits of history; they process grandly through novels thick with a breed of greeting-card lyricism. They have little of the complexity, the flaws and uncertainties, depth and beauty of Janie Crawford and the novel she springs from. — Zadie Smith

And I'm not going to get any thinner or any younger, my ass is going to hit the ground, if it hasn't already
and I want to be with somebody who can still see me in here. I'm still in here. And I don't want to be resented or despised for changing ... I'd rather be alone. — Zadie Smith

As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters. — Grover Cleveland

Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies
it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it. — Zadie Smith

He really was beautiful. I know boys aren't supposed to be, but he was. — John Green

The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation ... — Zadie Smith

Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I'm not saying that's what they really are. I'm just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you. — Zadie Smith

On Beauty

No, we could not itemize the list
of sins they can't forgive us.
The beautiful don't lack the wound.
It is always beginning to snow.

Of sins they can't forgive us
speech is beautifully useless.
It is always beginning to snow.
The beautiful know this.

Speech is beautifully useless.
They are the damned.
The beautiful know this.
They stand around unnatural as statuary.

They are the damned
and so their sadness is perfect,
delicate as an egg placed in your palm.
Hard, it is decorated with their face

and so their sadness is perfect.
The beautiful don't lack the wound.
Hard, it is decorated with their face.
No, we could not itemize the list.

Cape Cod, May 1974 — Zadie Smith

I never had a particularly strong craving to procreate, except for earlier fantasies of wanting to be Marmee in Little Women. — Anne Lamott

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is. — Nancy Pickard

And it's time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. — Zadie Smith

And I choose to be alone
Rather than wrapped in arms I could never need. — Merrit Malloy

The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The pernicious influence of the prize and medal giving in art is so great that it should be stopped. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong. — Robert Henri

A perfect date ends with a kiss and not with rain — Subhasis Das

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living. — Zadie Smith