Ali Smith Quotes & Sayings

She was living in a time when historically it was permissible to smile like that above the face of someone who had died a violent death. — Ali Smith

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise. — Ali Smith

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

Friends are always pretty, even when they're not. — Ali Smith

My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else. — Ali Smith

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. — Ali Smith

To be noticed is to be loved. — Ali Smith

Words words words. Words Words words. Words words Words. — Ali Smith

But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style. — Ali Smith

I was a she was a he was a we were a girl and a girl and a boy and a boy, we were blades, were a knife that could cut through myth, were two knives thrown by a magician, were arrows fired by a god, we hit heart, we hit home, we were the tail of a fish were the reck of a cat were the beack of a bird were the feather that mastered gravity were high above every landscape then down deep in the purple haze of the heather were roamin in a gloamin in a brash unending Scottish piece of perfect jiggling reeling reel can we really keep this up? this fast? this high? this happy? — Ali Smith

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

Say that the berries on a tree fermented / say that some birds ate them got drunk demented / couldn't fly straight flew straight into instead / wall of an office block and fell down dead / down on the pavement people undeterred / stepping over the mound of broken bird — Ali Smith

It's so warm it's almost friendly. A friendly work of art. I've never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. It's never sentimental. It's generous, but it's sardonic too. And whenever it's sardonic, a moment later it's generous again. — Ali Smith

The head has its confines. The head's got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons. — Ali Smith

But I prefer the windy days, the days that strip me back, blasted, tossed, who knows where, imagine them, purple-red, silver-pink, natural confetti, thin, fragile, easily crushed and blackened, fading already wherever the air's taken them across the city, the car parks, the streets, the ragged grass verges, dog-ear and adrift on the surfaces of the puddles, flat to the gutter stones, mixing with the litter, their shards of colour circling in the leafy-grimy corners of yards. — Ali Smith

(they were always, she was always, gloriously, just a little late, it made everything worth hurrying for), — Ali Smith

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

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

Always looking off to the side. But that's good too. It's good, to be seen past, as if you're not the only one, as if everything isn't happening just to you. Because you're not. And it isn't. — Ali Smith

Girl : do you hear me?
cause although it seemed to be the end of the world to me -
it wasn't.

There was a lot more world : cause roads that look set to take you in one direction will sometimes twist back on themselves without ever seeming anything other than straight, ... many things get forgiven in the course of a life : nothing is finished or unchangeable except death and even death will bend a little if what you tell of it is told right. — Ali Smith

My mother went on and on about it. Actually she went off on a tangent, I told her about your mother at one point and she went all (H starts doing a lightly French accent) it is not fair for your friend, she is not going to get the important boredoms and mournings and melancholies that are her due and are owing to her just from being the age that she is, for now it will be interrupted by real mournings and real melancholies ... — Ali Smith

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

Finally she lets herself think about how it feels:
to be so frightened that you almost can't breathe
to speed so fast and be so completely out of control
to know the meaning of helplessness
to spin across a shining space knowing any moment you might end up hurt, but likewise, all the same, like plus wise you just might not. — Ali Smith

Ideas never stop, dear S, they're everywhere, in everything - all we have to do is be open to them. And stories tend to arrive with their plots intact and reveal the plots in the writing. Often you think you've got a plot only to find, once you start writing, it's doing something else altogether. And the short story is the form most suited to the spatial moment, which is why it so touches us as a form, I think, with our lives so made up every day of the momentousness of the ordinary moment. — Ali Smith

There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in everything, everywhere we look. — Ali Smith

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves
- except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends.
Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineerings of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark. — Ali Smith

I penetrated to the heart of the forest, he says, sacrificed myself, and brought back - you. He — Ali Smith

That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature. — Ali Smith

Animals, Mark, have no use for nostalgia, Aunt Kenna says. It is not a tool for survival, my darling. But — Ali Smith

How adaptable human beings were without even realizing it, slipping blindly from state to state. One morning it was summer, the next you woke up and the whole year was over; one minute you were thirty, the next sixty, sixty next year quick as a wink, how fast it all was. How quickly and smoothly, yet how shockingly, when you thought about it, the seasons and the years gave way to each other — Ali Smith

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

I got up to get us a drink of water and as I stood in the kitchen in the early morning light, running the water out of the tap, I looked out at the hills at the back of the town, at the trees on the hills, at the bushes in the garden, at the birds, at the brand new leaves on a branch, at a cat on a fence, at the bits of wood that made the fence, and I wondered if everything I saw, if maybe every landscape we casually glanced at, was the outcome of an ecstasy we didn't even know was happening, a love-act moving at a speed slow and steady enough for us to be deceived into thinking it was just everyday reality. — Ali Smith

The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks. — Ali Smith

Time is just 'one damn thing after another ', Margaret Atwood says. That sounds like conventional narrative plot. And at the end of our allotted time, we'll end up in one of those, a conventional plot I mean, unless we stipulate otherwise in our wills. — Ali Smith

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. — Ali Smith

Cut this tree I'm living in down. Hollow its trunk out.
Make me all over again, with what you scooped out of its insides.
Slide the new me back inside the old trunk.
Burn me. Burn the tree. Spread the ashes, for luck, where you want next year's crops to grow.
Birth me and the tree
Next summer's sun
Midwinter guarantee — Ali Smith

Above the keyhole the door has a latch. It is pretending to be an authentic old latch. The door is pretending to be an authentic old door. Maybe everything there is isn't authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending. — Ali Smith

Giving is fraught with danger - as is taking. — Ali Smith

I wished that my own bones were unbound, I wished they were mingling, picked clean by fish, with the bones of another body, a body my bones and heart and soul had loved with unfathomable certainty for decades, and both of us down deep now, lost to everything but the fact of bare bones on a dark seabed. — Ali Smith

It's probably the closest thing resembling research I ever do (except for this last book, which took more traditional research) - listen to speech patterns. They're everywhere, on the train, in the street, in the shops, on TV, wherever you are. And yes, everyone's speech pattern changes depending on where and to whom they're talking. Ears open. Literally. (which is the word said about sixty times in five minutes by a group of teenagers sitting further up the train from me on my way here). — Ali Smith

And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left-say we lost everything-we'd still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognised line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we've forgotten we even know it. — Ali Smith

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. — Ali Smith

A great many men don't understand a woman full of joy, even more don't understand paintings full of joy by a woman. — Ali Smith

We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. 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. — Ali Smith

Then I wondered why on earth would anyone ever stand in the world as if standing in the cornucopic middle of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon but inside a tiny white-painted rectangle about the size of a single space in a car park, refusing to come out of it, and all around her or him the whole world, beautiful, various, waiting? — Ali Smith

Okay, I said. As long as I've got you here, we're going to use and appreciate this present moment. Because I wish, and I've wished a thousand times since you went, that we'd known it was the present, and that we were living in it. — Ali Smith

Edges are magic, too; there's a kind of forbidden magic on the borders of things, always a ceremony of crossing over, even if we ignore it or are unaware of it. — Ali Smith

I wished I was old. I was tired of being so young, so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the Internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I'd try to click on me, try to go any deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or MySpace, it was as if I knew that one morning I'd wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of I existed any more, because the servers all over the world were all down. And that's how rootless. And that's how fragile. — Ali Smith

Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, he said, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it. — Ali Smith

But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened. — Ali Smith

Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us. — Ali Smith

What, the Great War? in which your great-grandfather, who happened to be my grandfather, was gassed in the trenches not once, but twice? Which meant he and your great-grandmother were very poor, because he was too ill to work and died young? And meant I inherited his weak lungs? Not relevant to us? her mother says. And then the break-up of the Balkans, and the start of the territorial trouble in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the civil unrest in Ireland, and the shifts of power in Russia, and the power shifts in the Ottoman empire, and the bankruptcy, economic catastrophe and social unrest in Germany, all of which played a huge part in the rise of Fascism and in the bringing about of another war in which, as it happens, your own grandmother and grandfather
who happened to be my mother and father
both fought when they were just two or three years older than you? Not relevant? To us? — Ali Smith

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.' — Ali Smith

This story is true and happened once in the future long ago. — Ali Smith

She had entered him like he was water. Like he was a dictionary and she was a word he hadn't known was in him. Or she had entered him more simply, like he was a door and she opened him, leaving him standing ajar as she walked straight in. — Ali Smith

(this is before we're living together, before we do the most faithful act of all, mix our separate books into one library) — Ali Smith

He had seemed a man with whom the right kind of dialogue would be possible. — Ali Smith

I love your kiss. Everything's sorted, and obvious, and understood, and civilised, your kiss says. It's a shut-eye lie, I know it is, because the music I didn't know before I knew you makes me open my eyes in a place of no sentimentality, where light itself is a kind of shadow, where everything is fragment-slanted. — Ali Smith

[ ... ] its small squares of fast-passing light, the early evening windows of the lives of hundreds of others. — Ali Smith

As he said it Mark, belted in in the back seat, had watched the holy water glint inside the plastic bubble next to the Virgin Mary and had wondered if the holy water was selective too, and if that's what God was these days, and whether everybody now simply had a private god who sanctioned his or her own choices — Ali Smith

Everybody turns to look at him. It is quite frightening. — Ali Smith

Everything, sooner or later, transforms into story. — Ali Smith

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

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. — Ali Smith

Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase. — Ali Smith

I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in. — Ali Smith

So that is what history is, people and places that disappear, or are beheaded, or get damaged or nearly do, and things and places and people that get tortured and burned and so on. But this does not mean that history is not the unseen things as well. — Ali Smith

We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery. — Ali Smith

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

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

Yeah, but the thing I particularly like about the word but, now that I think about it, is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting. — Ali Smith

Did I? Daniel said. While we're here. Well. While we're here, let's just always hold out hope for the person who says it.
Says what, Mr Gluck? Elisabeth said.
Sure you want war? Daniel said. — Ali Smith

Well, truth's like the sun. Look right at it and that's your eyes ruined for life. — Ali Smith

It was all : it was nothing : it was more than enough. — Ali Smith

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. — Ali Smith

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. — Ali Smith

Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at. — Ali Smith

I cannot tell a lie. It was me who
chopped down the cherry tree. Now that
I've been so honest, make me a
precedent. No, not president. I said
precedent. — Ali Smith

He was clearly in love with Amber too, and this time it wasn't the usual water off the back of the duck. Instead, the duck, wounded by a hunter and bewildered because half its head had been shot way, and was still tottering about on its webby feet by the side of the pond. From the one side it looked like a duck usually looks. From the other, it was a different story. — Ali Smith

I'm good at the real and the true and the beautiful and can do With some skill and With or without flattery the Place where all 3 meet ... — Ali Smith

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. — Ali Smith

I fall in love. More figuratively speaking, I am walking along the road one day when out of nowhere I am struck by lightning. — Ali Smith

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn't there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google....Sure, there's a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante's inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shallows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities. — Ali Smith

Daniel is asleep. A care assistant, a different one today is swishingaroundthe room with a mop that smells of pine cleaner.

Elisabeth wonders what's doing to happen to all the care assistants. She realizes she hasn't so far encountered a single care assistant here who isn't from somewhere else in the world. That morning on the radio she;d heard a spokesperson say, but it's not just that we;ve been rhetorically and practically encouraging the opposite of integration for immigrants to this country. It's that we've been rhetorically and practically encouraging ourselves not to integrate. We've been doing this as a matter of self-policing since Thatcher taught us to be selfish and not just to think but to believe that there's no such thing as society.

Then the other spokesperson in the dialogue said, well, you would say that. Get over it. Grow up. Your time's over. Democracy. You lost. — Ali Smith

Winter. It made things visible. — Ali Smith

Remember you must live.
remember you most love.
remainder you mist leaf. — Ali Smith

Because, George thought as she sat there with her eyes closed back before Christmas in Mrs Rock's self-consciously comfortable chair in the counselling office, how can it be that there's an advert on TV with dancing bananas unpeeling themselves in it and teabags doing a dance, and her mother will never see that advert?
How can that advert exist and her mother not exist in the world?
She didn't say it out loud, though, because there wasn't a point.
It isn't about saying.
It is about the hole which will form in the roof through which the cold will intensify and after which the structure of the house will begin to shift, like it ought, and through which George will be able to lie every night in bed watching the black sky. — Ali Smith

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. — Ali Smith

Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I'd never been inside a smile before. Who'd have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once — Ali Smith

Gold mould as if blisters of the body can become precious metals. — Ali Smith

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. — Ali Smith

The third person is another pair of eyes. The third person is a presentiment of God ... a way to tell the story.
It's a box for the endless music that's there between people, waiting to be played. — Ali Smith

How are you feeling? Mrs Rock said.
I'm okay, George said. I think it's because I don't think I am.
You're okay because you don't think you're okay? Mrs Rock said.
Feeling, George said. I think I'm okay because I don't think I'm feeling. — Ali Smith

It was what we did," Helen [Clyne, Kate Atkinson's daughter] said. "It was a habit, a ritual. You borrowed it, you read it, you brought it back and chose something else, and someone else read whatever you read before and after you. It was communal. That's what public library means: something communal. — Ali Smith

What I do when it distresses me that there's something I can't remember, is. Are you listening?
Yes, Elisabeth said through the crying.
I imagine that whatever it is I've forgotten is folded close to me, like a sleeping bird.
What kind of bird? Elisabeth said.
A wild bird, Daniel said. Any kind. You'll know what kind when it happens. Then, what I do is, I just hold it there, without holding it to tight, and I let it sleep. And that's that. — Ali Smith

When you've nothing, at least you've all of it. — Ali Smith

There was once a child whose mother fell asleep. The end.
Is that it? I said
What else do you need to know? you said.
Can't you tell me a little more about them? I said. (I was beginning to despair of your storytelling technique.) — Ali Smith

Believe me. Everything is meant. — Ali Smith

Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we'd never sleep ever again. — Ali Smith

The novel, he was saying, was a flabby old whore.
A flabby old whore! the older man said looking delighted.
She was serviceable, roomy, warm and familiar, the younger was saying, but really a bit used up, really a bit too slack and loose.
Slack and loose! the older said laughing.
Whereas the short story, by comparison, was a nimble goddess, a slim nymph. Because so few people had mastered the short story she was still in very good shape.
... I idly wondered how many of the books in my house were fuckable and how good they'd be in bed. — Ali Smith