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.
alone human-condition knowledge-of-self
Download Image Share on X Share on Facebook

About This Quote

About Ali Smith

Ali Smith was a contemporary Scottish author and journalist. Ali Smith CBE FRSL is a Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist. Sebastian Barry described her in 2016 as "Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting". Read more on Wikipedia →

Themes

  • Alone — Solitude, independence, and the experience of being alone

More quotes by 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 ...”
— Ali Smith
adventure carpe-diem life living

“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...”
— Ali Smith
getting-in-love love passion romance

“Words were stories in themselves.”
— Ali Smith
language story words

“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...”
— Ali Smith
art eternity love poetry

“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...”
— Ali Smith
end-of-summer lack live make-the-most

“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...”
— Ali Smith
first-days flashback memory season
View all quotes by Ali Smith →

Related Quotes

“As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working ...”
— Sigmund Freud
alone analysis discoveries greatness

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, andin spite of True Romance magazineswe shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do no...”
— Hunter S. Thompson
alone birth death growing-up

“I never really understood the word loneliness. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.”
— Bjrk
alone bjork loneliness nature

“To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.”
— Herman Melville, Bartleby
human-condition pain pity

“The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.”
— Milan Kundera
human-condition humanity life nature

“The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them.”
— Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier
human-condition humanity soldier war

“Religion is that which congregate all the resources for spirituality (to attain the Self).”
— Dada Bhagwan
knowledge-of-self knowledge-of-the-self religion religions

“One achieves the Self-state (swa-artha) while searching for the highest truth (param-artha). The search for the highest truth is solely for the purpose of attaining the Self, and once the Self is a...”
— Dada Bhagwan
knowledge-of-self knowledge-of-the-self parmanand parmarth

“A true swarthi (interested in the Self) will become the absolute Self! This is considered paraartha (for the non-Self). A swarthi will attain the Self.”
— Dada Bhagwan
knowledge-of-self knowledge-of-the-self non-self self