Zadie Smith Quotes

People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something - always, in a word, seeking.

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.

Desire is wakeful; satisfaction dozes.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.

Longing, for everyone, is always there, isn't it? More intense at some times than others. You get closer to less longing - an odd metaphoric phrasing, I realize - then, you are further and longing more than ever again.

Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

When I want a thing, I want it dreadfully.

I think it's impossible not to see something you wanted happen to someone else and maybe wish it for yourself.

I never want to be satisfied.

If you desire, you are restless.

We don't even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires. We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths - but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.

Much thought has at its root a dissatisfaction with what is. Wanting is the urge for the next moment to contain what this moment does not. When there is wanting in the mind, that moment feels incomplete. Wanting is seeing elsewhere. Completeness is being right here.

We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.

Desire has no history.

I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.

Waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be. (Finding My Way Home)

We are the total of our longings.

The other girls in the village never felt restless. Nhamo was like a pot of boiling water. 'I want...I want...,' she whispered to herself, but she didn't know what she wanted and she had no idea how to find it.

All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.

I sat on the hill, the wind whispering through the long grass that surrounded me. I stared at the stars and wanted more than what I was and more than what the world was and just - wanted.

Love cannot in its very nature be peaceful or content. It is a restlessness, an unsatisfaction. I can grant a lasting love just as I can grant a lasting unsatisfaction; but the lasting love cannot be coupled with possession, for love is pain and desire and possession is easement and fulfilment.

Hope is wanting something so eagerly that-in spite of all the evidence that you're not going to get it-you go right on wanting it.

Longing desire prayeth always, though the tongue be silent. If thou art ever longing, thou art ever praying.