Ali Smith Quotes

Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.

Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.

Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.

I wouldn't call my work Modernist. I would rust if I try to think about labels. I'd feel like the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz.

To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.

Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.

Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.

We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.

Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?

Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book.

I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.

We all know our dates of birth but . . . every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it is the other date the death date.

You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, "I'm a writer," it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.

The whole point is, we can forget. It’s important that we forget some things. Otherwise we’d go round the world carrying a hodload of stuff we just don’t need.

There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.

I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored.

I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.

I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.

I was at the tail end of the family. The next brother along was already seven years older than me. I remember growing up by myself, playing games by myself.

The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.

The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.

Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.

There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.

All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.

remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.

Got a light? See? Careful. I'm everything you ever dreamed.

Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

Brave old world.

This isn’t fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.

Words are themselves organisms, ...

Words were stories in themselves.

But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.

Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?

Believe me. Everything is meant.

And after that, I watched our house collapse in on itself and I spent some time lying in the rubble. Then I vanished completely. I wasn't here at all. Then you phoned.

And they all lived happily ever after, until they died.

She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.

Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?

She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person.

It is perhaps rather fine, after all, being dead. Highly underrated in the modern western world.

He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. But he really looked like a girl. She was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen in my life.

Maybe it's easier to talk to someone who won't ever actually hear what you say.