Zadie Smith

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.

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?

They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.

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

In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.

A sprawling North London parkland, composed of oaks, willows and chestnuts, yews and sycamores, the beech and the birch; that encompasses the city__ highest point and spreads far beyond it; that is so well planted it feels unplanned; that is not the country but is no more a garden than Yellowstone; that has a shade of green for every possible felicitation of light; that paints itself in russets and ambers in autumn, canary-yellow in the splashy spring; with tickling bush grass to hide teenage lovers and joint smokers, broad oaks for brave men to kiss against, mown meadows for summer ball games, hills for kites, ponds for hippies, an icy lido for old men with strong constitutions, mean llamas for mean children and, for the tourists, a country house, its façade painted white enough for any Hollywood close-up, complete with a tea room, although anything you buy there should be eaten outside with the grass beneath your toes, sitting under the magnolia tree, letting the white blossoms, blush-pink at their tips, fall all around you. Hampstead Heath! Glory of London! Where Keats walked and Jarman fucked, where Orwell exercised his weakened lungs and Constable never failed to find something holy.

American houses...' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn__ time for anything else.

I'd decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.

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.

But singing isn__ just about belting it out, is it? It__ not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it__ 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__ you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?

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

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

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.

A little white woman, . . . [a] tiny little white woman I could fit in my pocket._ . . . __nd I don__ know why I__ surprised. You don__ even notice it _ you never notice. You think it__ normal. Everywhere we go, I__ alone in this_ this sea of white. I barely know any black folk any more, Howie. My whole life is white. I don__ see any black folk unless they be cleaning under my feet in the fucking café in your fucking college. Or pushing a fucking hospital bed through a corridor . . . __ gave up my life for you. I don__ even know who I am any more._ . . . __ould you have found anybody less like me if you__ scoured the earth? . . . My leg weighs more than that woman. What have you made me look like in front of everybody in this town? You married a big black bitch and you run off with a fucking leprechaun?

Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.

- 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.