She found it difficult, this thing of being alone, awaiting the arrival of a group. She prepared a face - as her favourite poet had it - to meet the faces that she met, and it was a procedure that required time and forewarning to function correctly. In fact, when she was not in company it didn't seem to her that she had a face at all... And yet in college, she knew she was famed for being opinionated, a 'personality' - the truth was she didn't take these public passions home, or even out of the room, in any serious way. She didn't feel that she had any real opinions, or at least not in the way other people seemed to have them. Once the class was finished she saw at once how she might have argued the thing just as viciously and successfully the other way round; defended Flaubert over Foucault; rescued Austen from insult instead of Adorno. Was anyone ever genuinely attached to anything? She had no idea. It was either only Zora who experienced this odd impersonality or it was everybody, and they were all play-acting, as she was. She presumed that this was the revelation college would bring her, at some point. In the meantime, waiting like this, waiting to be come upon by real people, she felt herself to be light, existentially light, and nervously rumbled through possible topics of conversation, a ragbag of weighty ideas she carried around in her brain to lend herself the appearance of substance. Even on this short trip to the bohemian end of Wellington - a journey that,...
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Zadie SmithSource:On Beauty
Link to full quote: Quote #1858 from On Beauty by Zadie Smith.
Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I'm not saying that's what they really are. I'm just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Zadie SmithSource:The Girl With Bangs
Link to full quote: Quote #1810 from The Girl With Bangs by Zadie Smith.
There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:29 — GabrielleWho Said It?:ZamyatinSource:A Soviet Heretic
Link to full quote: Quote #1203 from A Soviet Heretic by Zamyatin.
Don't you love my idealism? My hypocrisy? My willingness to sound as loving and naive as possible? At least I know that I don't know anything at all. I can admit it. Can you? Can you look yourself in the mirror in the morning and admit that you are no different from every other bundle of bones on this planet? And maybe the only things that make you different are your hands, the way you touch things, and what happens to them.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Zoe TropeSource:Please Don't Kill the Freshman
Link to full quote: Quote #1798 from Please Don't Kill the Freshman by Zoe Trope.
Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:30 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Zora Neale HurstonSource:Their Eyes Were Watching God
Link to full quote: Quote #1811 from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
She was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief.
Submitted on Thursday, March 19, 2009 - 14:28 — GabrielleWho Said It?:Zora Neale HurstonSource:Their Eyes Were Watching God
Link to full quote: Quote #123 from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
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