Feel Free Quotes

“I am seized by two contradictory feelings: there is so much beauty in the world it is incredible that we are ever miserable for a moment; there is so much shit in the world that it is incredible we are ever happy for a moment.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“Writing exists (for me) at the intersection of three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self. The first is never wholly mine; the second I can only ever know in a partial sense; the third is a malleable and improvised response to the previous two.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“Between propriety and joy choose joy.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“If novelists know anything it's that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“Libraries are not failing "because they are libraries." Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“My evidence—such as it is—is almost always intimate. I feel this—do you? I’m struck by this thought—are you?”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“Happy is the novelist,” claims Nabokov, “who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“But equally you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is “color-blind,” by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color—to look past it—to the “you” beneath. Not content with colonizing your country, he now colonizes your self”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. I still feel distant from them now, ever more so, as I increasingly opt out (by choice, by default) of the things they have embraced. We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics).
....
When a human being becomes a set of data on a Web site like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“Well, they got that habit from us. We always wanted to be seen to be right. To be on the right side of an issue. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“When everyone's building a fence, isn't it a true fool who lives out in the open?”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“Without the balancing setting of everyday life all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably?”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“So I might say to her: look, the thing you have to appreciate is that we’d just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes—and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“I worked regularly and kept a journal; I saw that creation was an accretive process which couldn’t be hurried, and which involved patience and, primarily, love. I felt more solid myself, and not as if my mind were just a kind of cinema for myriad impressions and emotions to flicker through.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“But it’s my sense that no matter how many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is “the family” is always an event of some violence. It’s only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English Civil War, of French wines—I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“But there have always been these people for whom rap language is more scandalous than the urban deprivation rap describes.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“And then she reverses direction and heads straight for Willesden Bookshop, an independent shop that rents space from the council and provides--no matter what Brent Council may claim--an essential local service. It is run by Helen. Helen is an essential local person. I would characterize her essentialness in the following way: 'Giving the people what they didn't know they wanted.' Important category.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“Novels are what I know, and the novel door in my personality is always open.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays