Quotes by 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 ...”

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

“Brave old world.”

“All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they'd really lost. All across the countr...”

“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 ...”

“My head, something happened to its insides. It was as if a storm at sea happened, but only for a moment, and only on the inside of my head. My ribcage, something definitely happened there. It was a...”

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

“Words are themselves organisms, ...”

“Words were stories in themselves.”

“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'...”

“This isnt fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.”

“The power of the artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, a form concerned with argument and persuasion, to say so. This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gra...”

“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 e...”

“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.”

“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 s...”

“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...”

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

“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 ...”

“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.”

“Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?”