Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Interpretation
Love is important, but basic needs like clean water are essential for everyone.
Zadie Smith's quote highlights the distinction between the universal craving for love and the fundamental needs that must be met for survival. While greeting cards promote the idea that love is a universal right, Smith reminds us that necessities such as clean water should take precedence, suggesting that not everyone is entitled to love without also considering the basic human rights and needs that must be fulfilled.
In practice
In a speech about social justice, this quote can exemplify the importance of prioritizing basic human rights.
Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.
You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
If Harvey [Milk] had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he would want me to say to all the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by the churches, by the government, by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value, and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights, federally, across this great nation of ours.
They aren't common, but enormously interesting. How can it be that you've been together that long and you're still intensely in love with them?
To say βI love youβ one must first know how to say the βI.β The meaning of the βIβ is an independent, self-sufficient entity that does not exist for the sake of any other person. A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.
Like first love, the heart of Russia will not forget you.
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings_x000D_ _x000D_ That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Close, close all night the lovers keep. They turn together in their sleep, Close as two pages in a book that read each other in the dark. Each knows all the other knows, learned by heart from head to toes.
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