It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the imbalance between individual rights and responsibilities in society.
Zadie Smith's quote reflects a modern societal trend where individuals prioritize their rights above their responsibilities, leading to a disconnection in civic duty and communal harmony. It suggests that focusing solely on personal rights without acknowledging corresponding duties can result in societal dysfunction and a lack of accountability among community members.
In practice
During a community meeting discussing social responsibility, this quote can encourage a more balanced approach to rights and duties.
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.
I think my worst problem is actually living in the moment and understanding everything that's going on. I feel like I'm in my own bubble.
We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.
...she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself.
Yesterday and tomorrow cross and mix on the skyline. The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets, one waits.
The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
To live is to feel oneself lost.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.