You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that one's personal desires can distort their perception of reality, leading to a potentially harmful self-centeredness.
Zadie Smith's quote reflects on the influence of personal desires on an individual's perception of reality. It warns against the sociopathic tendency of shaping one's environment solely to satisfy personal ambitions, indicating that such a delusion can lead to problematic behavior and a disconnect from the genuine needs of the broader world. It invites reflection on how our individual desires can cloud judgment and affect relationships with others.
In practice
In a psychology class to discuss the impact of personal desire on reality perception.
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 you have a great idea, you should be able to communicate it as well. It's like the sound of one hand clapping. You have a great idea but aren't able to express it - well, how great was the idea?
A man is not rightly conditioned until he is a happy, healthy, and prosperous being; and happiness, health, and prosperity are the result of a harmonious adjustment of the inner with the outer of the man with his surroundings.
There are no more thorough prudes than those who have some little secret to hide.
Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows
The quality of mercy is not strained
When people do not dread authorities, then a greater dread descends.
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