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Book: Feel Free: Essays
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  1. Zadie Smith _ Feel Free: Essays

    It's not just a matter of free books. A library is a different kind of social reality {of the three-dimensional kind}, which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.
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  2. Zadie Smith _ Feel Free: Essays

    Peele gets to the core of what contemporary entitlement looks like-concern with one's personal rights combined with non-interest in one's duties
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  3. Zadie Smith _ Feel Free: Essays

    It's only recently that I had any idea that how a person felt about libraries-not schools or hospitals, libraries-could even represent an ideological split. I thought a library was one of the few sites where the urge to conserve and the desire to improve-twin poles of our political mind-were easily and naturally united.
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  4. Zadie Smith _ Feel Free: Essays

    has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.
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  5. Zadie Smith _ Feel Free: Essays

    But equally you can't fight for a freedom you've forgotten how to identify.
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  6. Zadie Smith _ Feel Free: Essays

    Janet Jackson kicked off this curious phenomenon, Madonna continued it, Beyoncé is its apex. Here dancing is intended as a demonstration of the female will, a concrete articulation of its reach and possibilities. The lesson is quite clear. My body obeys me. My dancers obey me. Now you will obey me.
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  7. Zadie Smith _ Feel Free: Essays

    But it's my sense that no matter how many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is "the family" is always an event of some violence. It's only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.
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  8. Zadie Smith _ Feel Free: Essays

    All the difficult work of attunement and acceptance has already been done by others. Smart critics, other painters, appreciative amateurs. They kicked the door open almost a century ago-all I need do is walk through it.
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  9. Zadie Smith _ Feel Free: Essays

    Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel.
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  10. Zadie Smith _ Feel Free: Essays

    When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English Civil War, of French wines-I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?
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  11. Zadie Smith _ Feel Free: Essays

    certainly don't write as a public service. But I am aware, at least as a reader, that remarkable acts of art-making-bold, perverse, unbeholden, free-have had the side effect of changing the weather in a country, in a people, at a certain historical moment, and finally in me, conferring freedoms for which I am now very grateful.
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  12. Zadie Smith _ Feel Free: Essays

    Portnoy was not Roth and he was not real, but in him is enshrined a genuine Rothian freedom, created by Roth, once impossible, now fully realized, a freedom which anyone can now easily access. You don't even have to read the book: you are already living in the world that Portnoy touched and changed.
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