I liked, but did not love this book.The book begins with failure. Or “my humiliation” as the narrator, a young woman, puts it. The young woman has been sent back to London by some unknown employer. She is hiding in considerable affluence and is tasked with avoiding the public, not to escalate a situation. From …
Tag Archives: zadie smith
My name is Zadie Smith, and I am a 38-year-old pathological reader. I would like to say in my defense that I don’t really get the appeal of YOLO. I live many times over. Hypothetical, subterranean lives that run beneath the relative tedium of my own and have the power to occasionally penetrate or even …
The world is made out of letters, words. Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived. Smith, Zadie. The Autograph Man: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2003: 384
Hospitals are called St Mary’s, St Stephen’s, St Somebody’s. This one was St Christopher’s. They should all be called Job’s. Job is the rightful patron of hospitals. Job has guts. Smith, Zadie. The Autograph Man: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2003: 370
Alex, like everybody, held hospitals in the highest, purest, dread and loathing. To come in with a bump and leave with the baby – this is the only grace available in a hospital. Other than that, there is only pain. The concentration of pain. Hospitals are unique in this concentration. Smith, Zadie. The Autograph Man: …
Everything possible is being done to make him feel that nothing momentous, like flight, is occurring. At no point does anyone suggest that he and four hundred other strangers of unknown mental-health status are trapped in a 400-tonne aircraft flying thirty thousand feet up in the air relying on equations of energy and velocity that …
The last of the suburbs was still passing by, hunkered down for the winter and still as Sunday. Alex felt a particular yearning for the suburbs between an airport and a city; he wanted to stop the car and knock on one of those pine doors, and squeeze in between the fireman and his wife …
All fandom is a form of tunnel vision: warm and dark and infinite in one direction Smith, Zadie. The Autograph Man: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, (2003): 215 I just had to share this quote with you, tumblr.
Alex folded into the door-frame like Lauren Bacall. It was only 8.30 a.m., but already it was time to throw in the white towel. The day had looked good. The day had lied. He felt he could not fight days like this. He believed utterly that there are days in which it is revealed that …
CLARITY AND CHAOS 