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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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"A goatee is to beards what diamonds are to ornaments."

"It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building."

"They wore their strange beauty like war paint."

"The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude."

"I hate people who collect things and classify things and give them names and then forget all about them. That's what people are always doing in art. They call a painter an impressionist or a cubist or something and then they put him in a drawer and don't see him as a living individual painter any more."

"Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."

"A slight deviation form what we would think of as symmetry gives us a bit more information and the mind seems to enjoy this stimulation because it is always looking for value. Beauty is a slight deviation from expectation."

"Beauty is subjective. You know how sometimes what makes a person attractive is the way they make you laugh or how it seems like they can read your mind?"

"Everyone wants a little bit of something beautiful."

"Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice."
Explore more quotes by Zadie Smith

"You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality."

"It's like that quote: 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.' The choice between a duty or a principle, you know?"

"She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down."

"At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls."

"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."

"It's such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone."
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