Zadie Smith Quotes

Your soul either feels lifted by something that you read, or it feels squashed by it.

Sometimes a miracle is a change in material conditions, such as physical healing. At other times, it is a psychological or emotional change.

That's the magic of art and the magic of theatre: it has the power to transform an audience, an individual, or en masse, to transform them and give them an epiphanal experience that changes their life, opens their hearts and their minds and the way they think.

I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend

In meditation, once you are gone in, you are gone in. Then, even when you resurrect you are a totally different person. The old personality is nowhere to be found. You have to start your life again from abc. You have to learn everything with fresh eyes, with a totally new heart. That's why meditation creates fear.

The less there is of you, the more you experience the sublime.

"He mentioned it!" one of the ghosts whimpered.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

It's always necessary to know when a stage of one's life has ended. If you stubbornly cling to it after the need has passed, you lose the joy and meaning of the rest. And you risk being shaken to your senses by God.

It was strange and amusing...and, honestly, a bit embarrassing...to realize how much being near Bella had softened me. It seemed like no one was afraid of me any more. If Emmett found out about this, he would be laughing for the next century.

Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.

There is no place so awake and alive as the edge of becoming. But more than that, birthing the kind of woman who can authentically say, 'My soul is my own,' and then embody it in her life, her spirituality, and her community is worth the risk and hardship.

Love has made me a different person. It has made the world beautiful.

Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever.

Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit.

Change means the unknown.

With acting, it's like becoming another person. I think that's neat, especially when you totally forget. If you totally forget, which I love to do, that's when it's magic.

...Lovers are Like walking ghosts, they always haunt the spot Of their misdeeds.

I play with passion and fire. I have to accept that sometimes this fire does harm.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.

And then her heart changed, or at least she understood it; and the winter passed, and the sun shone upon her.

One day you're going to learn something that can't be explained with science. And when that happens, your life's going to change in ways you can't imagine.