People profess to have certain political positions, but their conservatism or liberalism is really the least interesting thing about them.
Interpretation
Political labels are superficial and don't capture the complexity of individuals.
In this quote, Zadie Smith suggests that the political affiliations people claim do not define their entire identity. Instead, she argues that individuals are far more complex than their conservative or liberal labels, highlighting the richness of human experience that transcends political views.
In practice
In a debate about political ideologies, one might use this quote to illustrate that people's beliefs are multi-faceted.
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.
Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.
There are no experts in the company of Jesus. We are all beginners, necessarily followers, because we donβt know where we are going.
If there's one thing that really annoys a god, it's not knowing something.
Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.
There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.
Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.
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