I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.
Interpretation
The quote reflects concerns about one's understanding of what it means to be a person, questioning if it is rooted in outdated or flawed ideas.
In this quote, Zadie Smith expresses anxiety about her perception of personhood, suggesting that her concept may be influenced by nostalgia, which can distort reality. This self-reflective statement acknowledges the complexities of identity and the potential for subjective interpretations of what it means to be human, implying that our views might be shaped by personal biases and historical contexts.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of identity and how it evolves over time.
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.
Law never is, but is always about to be.
No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems arenβt designed to produce them, if we donβt speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.
The true mystic is always both humble and compassionate, for she knows that she does not know.
True liberty consists only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Pray without ceasing on behalf of other men...For cannot he that falls rise again?
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