Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Interpretation
Love is important, but basic needs like clean water are essential for everyone.
Zadie Smith's quote highlights the distinction between the universal craving for love and the fundamental needs that must be met for survival. While greeting cards promote the idea that love is a universal right, Smith reminds us that necessities such as clean water should take precedence, suggesting that not everyone is entitled to love without also considering the basic human rights and needs that must be fulfilled.
In practice
In a speech about social justice, this quote can exemplify the importance of prioritizing basic human rights.
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.
Real men stay faithful. They don't have time to look for other women because they're too busy looking for new ways to love their own.
I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.
I may say that B-love, in a profound but testable sense, creates the partner. It gives him a self-image, it gives him self- acceptance, a feeling of love-worthiness, all of which permit him to grow. It is a real question whether the full development of the human being is possible without it.
I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death, a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment β if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes β everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense.
If you wish to heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another. Those others are waiting for you now. They are looking to you for guidance, for help, for courage, for strength, for understanding, and for assurance at this hour. Most of all, they are looking to you for love.
It's so dreadful to have nothing to love - life is so empty - and there's nothing worse than emptiness.
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