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"On BeautyNo, we could not itemize the listof 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 usspeech 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 damnedand so their sadness is perfect,delicate as an egg placed in your palm.Hard, it is decorated with their faceand 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."
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"The eye is the jewel of the body."

"The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books."

"Purposefully look for something beautiful today."

"There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy."

"As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead."

"There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started."

"I've alway found that the most beautiful people, truly beautiful inside and out, are the ones who are quietly unaware of their effect."

"Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul."
Explore more quotes by Zadie Smith

"Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with a little condescension; with low expectation of the other's rationality; with the knowledge that the other will find what they say hard to understand, that it will go beyond them (not so much over the head as between the legs); and with the feeling that they must arrive with something the other will like, something suitable."

"Jerome said, It's like, a family doesn't work anymore when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone, You know?"

"That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made."

"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."

"They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire."

"Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts, ... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul."

"They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up."

"To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use."

"It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe."

"Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied."
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