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

  Ali Smith

  Tombstone, Want, Headstone

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

  Ali Smith

  Heart, Reason

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

  Ali Smith

  Said, Knows, Hard

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

  Ali Smith

  Important, Stories, Knows

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

  Ali Smith

  Moving, Space, Corsets

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• 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

  Character, Past, Rolling Along

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

  Ali Smith

  Eye, Broken, Might

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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, Toes, Growing

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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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• 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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• 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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