Ali Smith Quotes

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

  Ali Smith

  Too Late, Realizing, Fractions

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• 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

  Two, Narrative, Invisible

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

  Ali Smith

  Moving, Book, Mean

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• 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

  Believe, Book, Reading

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

  Ali Smith

  Book, Argument, Proof

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

  Ali Smith

  Wells, Unimaginable, Known

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

  Ali Smith

  Goodness, Shattered, Filled

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• Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.

  Ali Smith

  Stella

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

  Ali Smith

  Art

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• What shop did this book come from? she asked. Her father was looking worried at the cooker. He always got rice wrong. I don't know, Brooksie, he said, I don't remember. That was unimaginable, not remembering where a book has come from! and where it was bought from! That was part of the whole history, the whole point, of any book that you owned! And when you picked it up later in the house at home, you knew, you just knew by looking and having it in your hand, where it came from and where you got it and when and why you'd decided to buy it.

  Ali Smith

  Father, Book, Home

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• 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.

  Ali Smith

  Google, Promise, Needs

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• 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.

  Ali Smith

  Joy, Insightful, Stories

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• 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

  Running, Dust, Would Be

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• And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.

  Ali Smith

  Rivers, Brave, Rope

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• It's about the connecting force from form to form. It's the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It's the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.

  Ali Smith

  Environmental, Growing, Toes

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

  Ali Smith

  Clothes, Long, Important

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• 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.

  Ali Smith

  Important, Needs, World

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• 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

  Years, Knowing, Important

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

  Ali Smith

  Robins, Goodman

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

  Ali Smith

  Looks, Kind

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• 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

  Eye, Would Be, Saws

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

  Ali Smith

  Remember You, Remembers You, Mist

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• Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly; they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four. The clouds were high and the swallows would be here for another month or so before they left for the south before they returned again next summer.

  Ali Smith

  Summer, Autumn, Sunday

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• Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.

  Ali Smith

  Air, Smell, Tonight

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• A game one of my sisters will play with me in my first year of being alive is called Good Baby, Bad Baby. This consists of being told I am a good baby until I smile and laugh, then being told I am a bad baby until I burst into tears. This training will stand me in good stead all through my life.

  Ali Smith

  Baby, Years, Games

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