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White Teeth
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White Teeth (2000) (edit title/settings)

by Zadie Smith (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this... read more

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  • “No one told Archie that lurking in the Diagilo family tree were two hysteric aunts, an uncle who talked to aubergines and a cousin who wore his clothes back to front.”
    Narrator
  • “Once the car started to fill with gas, he had experienced the obligatory flashback of his life to date.”
    Narrator
  • “That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.”
    Narrator
  • “For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood. He is in maybe this, maybe that kind of mood.”
    Narrator
  • “WELCOME TO THE 'END OF THE WORLD' PARTY, 1975”
  • “Go home, get some rest. Marnin' de the world new, every time. Man...dis life no easy!”
    Clara
  • “Clara went as red as black people get and looked at the floor.”
  • “Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself..”
  • “The principles of Christianity and Sod's Law (also known as Murphy's Law) are the same: Everything happens to me, for me.”
    Narrator
  • “Big eyes, like a child's or a baby seal's; the physiognomy of innocence - looking at Archie Jones is like looking at something that expects to be clubbed round the head any second.”
    Narrator
  • “''Whatever was told to Zinat invariably lit up the telephone network, rebounded off aerials, radio waves and satellites along the way, picked up finally by advanced alien civilizations as it bounced through the atmosphere of planets far removed from this one.''”
  • “Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”
  • “She'd done silence, and word-strikes and food consumption (the opposite of a hunger-strike; one gets bigger in order to intimidate the enemy), and now she was attempting a sit-down protest.”
  • “Past tense, future imperfect.”
  • “The brothers begin to argue. It escalates in moments, and they make a mockery of that idea, a neutral place; instead they cover the room with history – past, present and future history (for there is such a thing) – they take what was blank and smear it with the stinking shit of the past like excitable, excremental children. They cover this neutral room in themselves. Every gripe, the earliest memories, every debated principle, every contested belief.”
  • “But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. And as Archie knows, it’s not like that. It’s never been like that.”
  • “Samad had stepped out on to the front steps silently as a shadow, in another of Dickinson-Smith's uniforms and with a cigarette hanging casually off his lower lip like a sophisticated sentence.”
  • “Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”
  • “"You'll stay for dinner, won't you?" pleaded Joyce. 'Oscar really wants you to stay. Oscar loves having strangers in the house, he finds it really stimulating. Especially brown strangers! Don't you, Oscar?""No, I dont'", confided Oscar, spitting in Irie's ear. "I hate brown strangers.""He finds brown strangers really stimulating." whispered Joyce.”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.
    Highlighted by 57 Kindle customers
  • Because this is the other thing about immigrants (’fugees, émigrés, travelers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.
    Highlighted by 51 Kindle customers
  • If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.
    Highlighted by 48 Kindle customers
  • For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt—something is gained but something is lost.
    Highlighted by 45 Kindle customers
  • Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
    Highlighted by 44 Kindle customers
  • “Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddah, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can’t. On both occasions, the man breathes.”
    Highlighted by 42 Kindle customers
  • You are never stronger, thought Samad as he approached the doctor, than when you land on the other side of despair.
    Highlighted by 34 Kindle customers
  • the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity.
    Highlighted by 33 Kindle customers
  • That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.
    Highlighted by 21 Kindle customers
  • Oh, there was a certain pleasure. And don’t ever underestimate people, don’t ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bombs fall on television, from listening to stifled sobs from the other end of a telephone line. Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
    Highlighted by 20 Kindle customers
Show all 29 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Archie 1974, 1945
1. The Peculiar Second Marraige of Archie Jones
2. Teething Trouble
3. Two Families
4. The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal

Samad 1984, 1857
6. The Temptation of Samad Iqbal
7. Molars
8. Mitosis
9. Mutiny!
10. The Root Canals of Mangal Pande

Irie 1990, 1907
11. The Miseducation of Irie Jones
12. Canines: The Ripping Teeth
13. The Root Canals of Hortense Bowden
14. More English Than the English
15. Chalfenism Versus Bowdenism

Magid, Millat amd Marcus 1992, 1999
16. The Return of Magid Mahfooz Murshed Mubtasim Iqbal
17 Crisis Talks and Eleventh Hour Tactics
18. The End of History Versis The Last Man
19. The Final Space
20. Of Mice and Memory

Series & Lists edit see section history

This book is in Well-Designed Book Covers. (community list)
This book is in TIME Magazine Top 100 English-Language Novels. (community list)
This is book 8 of 100 in Top 100 Books That Defined The Noughties (Telegraph). (authoritative list)

Preceded by The Savage Detectives, and followed by Atonement.

This book is in Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. (authoritative list)
This is book 54 of 1272 in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. (authoritative list)

Preceded by Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, and followed by The Heart of Redness.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Zadie Smith (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Country: United Kingdom
Publication Date: 2000
ISBN: 024113997X
Page Count: 480

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history

   
  • Finding Beauty in a Broken World
  • The Bibliophile's Devotional

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