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Intimations QUOTES

Intimations QUOTES

1 " The enviable style of the young is little protection against catastrophe. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

2 " Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating your concept of reality. But it can at least be brought to mind; acknowledged comprehended, even atoned for through transformative action. By comparing your privilege with that of others you may be able to modify both your world and the worlds outside your world - if the will is there to do it. Suffering is not like that. Suffering has an absolution relation to the suffering individual - it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like ‘privilege’. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

3 " Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do 'something', that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I'm not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

4 " ... the truth is that not enough carriers of this virus have ever been willing to risk the potential loss of any aspect of their social capital to find out what kind of America might lie on the other side of segregation. They are very happy to "blackout" their social media for a day, to read all-black books, and "educate" themselves about black issues—as long as this education does not occur in the form of actual black children attending their actual schools. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

5 " I do feel comforted to discover I'm not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

6 " I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

7 " You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

8 " Experience rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. Writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pout it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

9 " But when the bad day in your week finally arrives—and it comes to all—by which I mean, that particular moment when your sufferings, as puny as they may be in the wider scheme of things, direct themselves absolutely and only to you, as if precisely designed to destroy you and only you, at that point it might be worth allowing yourself the admission of the reality of suffering, if not for yourself, exactly, then in preparation for that next painful bout of videoconferencing, so that you don’t roll your eyes or laugh or puke while listening to what some other person seems to think is pain. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

10 " used to think that there would one day be a vaccine: that if enough black people named the virus, explained it, demonstrated how it operates, videoed its effects, protested it peacefully, revealed how widespread it really is, how the symptoms arise, how so many Americans keep giving it to each other, irresponsibly and shamefully, generation after generation, causing intolerable and unending damage both to individual bodies and to the body politic—I thought if that knowledge became as widespread as could possibly be managed or imagined that we might finally reach some kind of herd immunity. I don’t think that anymore. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

11 " (To fear the contagion of poverty is reasonable. To keep voting for policies that ensure the permanent existence of an underclass is what is meant by ‘structural racism’.) "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

12 " War transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence. Strange inversions proliferate. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

13 " Ever since I was a child my only thought or insight into apocalypse, disaster or war has been that I myself have no “survival instinct,” nor any strong desire to survive, especially if what lies on the other side of survival is just me. A book like The Road is as incomprehensible to me as a Norse myth cycle in the original language. Suicide would hold out its quiet hand to me on the first day—the first hour. And not the courageous suicide of self-slaughter, but simply the passive death that occurs if you stay under the bed as they march up the stairs, or lie down in the cornfield as the plane fitted with machine guns heads your way. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

14 " When in the presence of a child, get on the floor. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

15 " Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating, your conception of reality. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

16 " I always tell my students: "A style is a means of insisting on something." A line of Sontag's. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

17 " Writing is what I know. Conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat. What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the way I do time. The way I’ve done it all my life. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

18 " Contempt. Back in February, “herd immunity” had been a new concept for the people… A man called George. He was alerting the officer to the fact that he was about to die. You’d have to hate a man a lot to kneel on his neck till he dies in plain view of a crowd and a camera, knowing the consequences this would likely have upon your own life. (Or you’d have to be pretty certain of immunity from the herd—not an unsafe bet for a white police officer, historically, in America.) But this was something darker—deadlier. It was the virus, in its most lethal manifestation. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

19 " If the virus and the inequalities it creates were ever to leave us, America’s extremities would fade. They wouldn’t disappear—no country on Earth can claim that—but some things would no longer be considered normal. There would no longer be those who are taught Latin and those who are barely taught to read. There would no longer be too many people who count their wealth in the multimillions and too many who live hand to mouth. A space launch would not be hard followed by a riot. White college kids would not smoke weed in their dorms while their black peers caught mandatory sentences for selling it to them. America would no longer be that thrilling place of unbelievable oppositions and spectacular violence that makes more equitable countries appear so tame and uneventful in comparison. But the questions have become: Has America metabolized contempt? Has it lived with the virus so long that it no longer fears it? Is there a strong enough desire for a different America within America? "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations

20 " There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. "

― Zadie Smith , Intimations