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"My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world."
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"She may have been among them but she could never be one of them. She was without inclusion for-as-much as she was not "one of the girls" and she wasn't "one of the guys." She was an outsider gazing in, endlessly comfortless, while they wished they had what it took to be less like the others and more like her."
"The image of God is in every human."
"When we speak, dress, and think like others, we live with the goal of achieving the approval they have."
"I'm not abnegation, I'm not dauntless, I am Divergent."
"I feel like how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do."
"Your original self is worth more than your imitation of someone else."
"Without accepting ourselves, we try to meet requirements of society and do everything to be accepted."
"Find yourself, who are you?Choose yourself, who can you be?Define yourself to find your destination."
"It's not the appearance that makes a man, it's the man that makes an appearance."
"The light of God's love makes us unique personalities."
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."
"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."
"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."
"By Allah, how _thankful_ he is (_yes, madam, one moment, madam_), how _gladdened_ by the thought that Magid, Magid at least, will, in a matter of four hours, be flying east from this place and its demands, its constant cravings, this place where there exists neither patience nor pity, where the people want what they want _now_, right now (_We've been waiting twenty minutes for the vegetables_), expecting their lovers, their children, their friends, and even their gods to arrive at little cost and in little time, just as table ten expect their tandoori prawns. . . ."
"I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame."
"But singing isn't just about belting it out, is it? It's not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it's about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don't you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?"
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