My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.
Interpretation
People desire equal chances to succeed regardless of their background, and the lack of such opportunities is disheartening.
In this quote, Zadie Smith expresses her belief that individuals across different social classes desire equal opportunities in life. She identifies the absence of these opportunities as a source of despair, highlighting the importance of social equity to enable everyone to pursue their ambitions and potential.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about social justice.
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.
Women must have economic and social equality with men.
A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi... has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.
I think the problem is, exceptional women will always succeed. But there are plenty of less-exceptional men who succeed. Until we get the less-exceptional women succeeding equally, we do not have full equality.
The media says that equality for women has arrived, but if you look around, you still don't see girls playing guitars and having success with it.
Male and female citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, must be equally admitted to all honors, positions, and public employment according to their capacity and without other distinctions besides those of their virtues and talents.
I believe women not just in the United States but throughout the world deserve equality and freedom but know I am in no position to tell women of other cultures what that equality and freedom should look like.
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