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.
Normality is a fine ideal for those who have no imagination.
The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.
It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.
Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.
When I was fifteen, all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time.” - But there’s no place like that in this world. - Exactly. Which is why I’m living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break.
We have to recognize that spirituality is a legitimate dimension in the psyche. It's a legitimate dimension in the universal scheme of things. It doesn't mean that you are superstitious, that you are in to magical, primitive thinking, if you take spirituality seriously.
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