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"You never know, until it happens, what you will owe the dead."
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Exlpore more Mortality quotes
"There is no conclusive evidence of life after death, but there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know, so why fret about it?"
"Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then-our friends are not able to finish their stories."
"Are-you dying?" she asked."Just can't breathe. This air.""Poor, poor-good lord. I've forgotten your name.""Hell of a thing.""Barney!"He clutched her."No! Don't stop!" She arched her back. Her teeth chattered."I wasn't going to," he said. "Oooaugh!"He laughed."Don't please laugh at me.""Not meant unkindly."A long silence, then. Then, "Oof."
"I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it."
"Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing-a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces."
"For he who lives more lives than one More deaths than one must die."
"After you die, a rare friend or family member may carry your memory throughout life. Most will forget you. As if you were never here."
"You could have died later on, you could have died after peace had been declared. But, in any case, you were going to die."
"Personally, I always wondered about authors and celebrities who loudly declared there was no God. It was usually when they were healthy and popular and being listened to by crowds. What happens, I wondered, in the quiet moments before death? By then, they have lost the stage, the world has moved on. If suddenly, in their last gasping moments, through fear, a vision, a late enlightenment, they change their minds about God, who would know?"
Explore more quotes by Zadie Smith
"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."
"They caught up with each other's news casually, leaving long, cosy gaps of silence in which to go to work on their muffins and coffees. Jerome - after two months of having to be witty and brilliant in a strange town among strangers - appreciated the gift of it. People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two lovers, but this too was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. ~ on the comforts of home."
"It starts innocently. Casually. You turn up at the annual spring fair full of beans, help with the raffle tickets (because the pretty red-haired music teacher asks you to) and win a bottle of whiskey (all school raffles are fixed), and, before you know where you are, you're turning up at the weekly school council meetings, organizing concerts, discussing plans for a new music department, donating funds for the rejuvenation of the water fountains-you're implicated in the school, you're involved in it. Sooner or later you stop dropping your children at the school gates. You start following them in."
"The wind picked up, shaking the trees below. She had the sense of being in the country. In the country, if a woman could not face her children, or her friends, or her family " if she were covered in shame " she would probably only need to lay herself down in a field and take her leave by merging, first with the grass underneath her, then with the mulch under that. A city child, Natalie Blake had always been naive about country matters. Still, when it came to the city, she was not mistaken. Here nothing less than a break " a sudden and total rupture " would do."
"You look fine. - 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."
"Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself."
"Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him."
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