Favorite Quotes From 'Intimations' by Zadie Smith

I picked this book up on a total whim at the Yonkers Barnes & Nobel during a week long stint of housesitting my childhood home. I’d heard of Zadie Smith but never read any of her work. I do love the short personal essay format and I was keen to read about this writer’s account of the darkest days of the early pandemic. I’ve it’s still a popular conversation topic especially if you don’t really know the person you’re talking to very well. It’s very short, less than 100 pages and I hesitate to count it among the total number of books I’ve read this year due to it’s length—but that is an utterly useless thought. And as always, I’m a complete sucker for anything that takes place in New York. Anyway, below are a few favorite line.

• “And once in a while a vulgar strain of spring flower will circumvent a long-trained and self-consciously strict downtown aesthetic.” (p. 10)

• “My current favorite is ‘What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow’ by Toni Cade Bambara, written back in 1980, which has the advantage of having a no-bullshit title and very little bullshit in the body of the piece.” (p. 17)

• “At the end of April, in a powerful essay by another writer, Ottessa Moshfegh, I read this line about love: ‘Without it, life is just ‘doing time.’’ I don’t think she intended by this only romantic love, or parental love, or familial love or really any kind of love in particular. At least, I read it in the Platonic sense: Love with a capital L, an ideal form and essential part of the universe—like ‘Beauty’ or the color red—from which all particular examples on earth take their nature.” (p. 25)

• “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 puke while listening to what some other person seems to think is pain.” (p. 36)

• “There is an ideal, rent-controlled city dweller who appears to experience no self-pity, who knows exactly how long to talk to someone in the street, who creates community without overly sentimentalizing the concept—or ever saying aloud the word ‘community’—who always picks up after their dog, even if it’s physically painful to do so.” (p. 50)

• “I always tell my students: ‘A style is a means of insisting on something.’ A line of Sontag’s. Every semester I repeat it, and every year the meaning of this sentence extends and deepens in my mind, blooming and multiplying like a virus, until it covers not just literary aesthetics and the films of Leni Riefenstahl but bedrooms, gardens, makeup, spectacles, camera angles, dances, gaits, gestures, sexual positions, haircuts, iPone covers, bathroom taps, fonts, drink orders, dogs and people, and so much more—but people above all.” (p. 53)

• “But the young man in his twenties is still in peak dreaming season: a thrilling time, an insecure time, even at the best of times. It should be a season full of possibility. Economic, romantic, technological, political, existential possibility. Yes, amount all the various relatives to be considered, age is one that can’t be parsed.” (p. 58)