Zadie Smith Quotes

To live is to feel oneself lost.

Sometimes I wonder where I am from. I am either way ahead or I come from another world. I don't recognise this world.

But who are we, where do we come from When all those years Nothing but idle talk is left And we are nowhere in the world?" = MEETING =

The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

Most of my films seem to be about people bewildered by the world around them, who don't fit into it and are trying to understand it.

I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.

I think my whole identity is formed around not knowing where I'm from. It might even be that I find comfort in that confusion.

My motivation is, in part, a bit of angst that comes from feeling like I don't belong, that our generation doesn't belong.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

I had grown a thin mustache, I was a full-grown man, and yet I was completely helpless and without a goal in life.

Once upon a time . . . What time are we upon and where do I belong?

I couldn't say who I am, I haven't the remotest notion of myself; I am someone without antecedents, without a history, without a country, and on that I insist!

Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

You thought you were found but you realize that you were lost, and someday you may discover that you're lost now.

Right now everything looks so strange to me, as if I don't belong here. It's me that's out of place. And the worst thing is that I feel there's somewhere I do belong, but I just can't find it.

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?

In a universe suddenly divested of illusion and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.

If I had one day when I didn't have to be all confused and didn't have to feel that I was ashamed of everything. If I felt that I belonged someplace. You know?

I'm trying to get at this. That is, a man may know that he belongs to, say, a group - this group or that group - but he feels himself lost within that group, trapped within his own deficiencies and without personal purpose.

The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens , provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.

I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't even know anymore why I was living.

I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.