Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Ali Smith, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Ali Smith quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 140 Ali Smith quotes for you to read and share.
(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
That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature. -- 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
That there can still be as-yet untranslated fiction by [Tove] Jansson is simultaneously an aberration and a delight, like finding buried treasure. -- Ali Smith
Before she had died she had been young, like him, and not yet been onced by life. Today -- Ali Smith
It was cruel, though, to want to, and tempting, so I'd become an expert at almost. -- Ali Smith
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
How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on 'Top of the Pops' singing 'Life on Mars.' -- Ali Smith
I'm blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that's almost never what our friendships are about. And every writer I've ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it's important not to mix the two up. -- 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
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
We have to hope, Daniel was saying, that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters. -- 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
And they all lived happily ever after, until they died. -- Ali Smith
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
And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see it? -- Ali Smith
Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness. -- Ali Smith
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
In fact all he can remember of her is that he sent her a postcard he wished afterwards he'd kept for himself. -- 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
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
But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless. -- 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
Winter. It made things visible. -- Ali Smith
Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned? -- 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
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
Words are themselves organisms, ... -- 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
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
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
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
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
You hold me very tight in under my clothes, and if there's a library anywhere near then someone just removed its roof, the shelves just flooded with the sun and all the old books just remembered what it means to be bound in skin and to have a spine. -- Ali Smith
All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other. -- 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
One day instead the old woman said kind words to her and gave her an awning on a stick to keep rain off (there has been much rain in purgatorium) -- 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
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
There was once, and there was only once; once was all there was. -- Ali Smith
You're going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history. Otherwise there'll be no good hope for your own grand truths and no good truths for your own grandchildren. -- 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
The Essentials of English, book of choice of the older boys at St. Faith's for spanking the younger boys with, leaving a particular broad-natured pain ever afterwards associated with grammar. -- Ali Smith
It was all : it was nothing : it was more than enough. -- Ali Smith
I penetrated to the heart of the forest, he says, sacrificed myself, and brought back - you. He -- Ali Smith
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
Yes, but everywhere needs some defence against people just coming in and overrunning the place with their terrorisms or their deficiencies, eh, sweetheart, Richard says. That's right, Terence says. Got to keep all those bad refugees out. The ones looking for a better life. Couldn -- Ali Smith
The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks. -- 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
I went outside mournful, and I hit pure air. -- Ali Smith
Friends are always pretty, even when they're not. -- Ali Smith
Their nineteen-sixties with the flowers in the guns and their summers of love, as if all we'd had was winter, all we'd had was rations. Just very good at keeping quiet, is what we were. We had to be. It was the way. Them with their jet-age. -- Ali Smith
Everything, sooner or later, transforms into story. -- Ali Smith
Well, truth's like the sun. Look right at it and that's your eyes ruined for life. -- Ali Smith
I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light, like a river seen from a train makes a channel of sky etch itself deep into a landscape. I had not really known I could be so much more than myself. I had not known another body could do this to mine. -- Ali Smith
Believe me. Everything is meant. -- Ali Smith
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
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
The whole point is, we can forget. It's important that we forget some things. Otherwise we'd go round the world carrying a hotload of stuff we just don't need. -- 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 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
Whole worlds open up when we start a conversation. -- 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
So always risk your skin, she said, and never fear losing it, cause it always does some good one way or another when the powers that be deign to take it off us. -- Ali Smith
Even things which seem separate and finished are infinitely connected and will infinitely connect. This connection happens as soon as you let it, as soon as you engage - as soon as you even attempt to engage. -- Ali Smith
Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay. -- Ali Smith
I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in. -- 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
Got a light? See? Careful. I'm everything you ever dreamed. -- Ali Smith
(they were always, she was always, gloriously, just a little late, it made everything worth hurrying for), -- Ali Smith
Remember you must live.
remember you most love.
remainder you mist leaf. -- Ali Smith
- But I'm telling you. I swear, music. I get home, and it's the music again. Every night I hear it playing. I don't know what to do about it.
- Have you tried dancing to it? -- Ali Smith
Maybe it's easier to talk to someone who won't ever actually hear what you say. -- 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 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
I would rather die and to go hell than wake up one day and find myself an inmate in that guesthouse of gone minds, gone things, bad carpets, furniture that needs permission. -- Ali Smith
Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late. -- 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
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
She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears. -- Ali Smith
Here was all about the visible-invisible borders, the thin lines between here and gone, then and now, here and there, random and meant, big and small. -- Ali Smith
Gold mould as if blisters of the body can become precious metals. -- Ali Smith
Everybody turns to look at him. It is quite frightening. -- Ali Smith
There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them. -- Ali Smith
[ ... ] its small squares of fast-passing light, the early evening windows of the lives of hundreds of others. -- 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
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
It is like her mother has been struck by - what? Lightening. Her mother has lightened up since the moment they landed in this country and the plane door opened and the warmer air came in.
The moment they walked into this room she lightened even more -- Ali Smith
She was working at her computer in her office, doing admin, which is short for administration, which is short for migraine-stimulant. -- Ali Smith
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
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
To be noticed is to be loved. -- Ali Smith
What I know most is that the difference between us is what makes us interesting and attractive and problematic and exciting and vital to each other. Give me difference over indifference any day. -- Ali Smith
I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to any more. I'm tired of being made to feel this fearful. I -- Ali Smith
Want is quite a complicated word there, because there's volo, which means I want, but it's not usually used with people. Desidero? I feel the want of, I desire. Amabo? I will love. But what if I will never love? What if I will never desire? What if I will never want?
Numquam amabo? -- Ali Smith
Abba songs, as anyone who knows knows, are constructed, technically and harmonically, so as to physically imprint the human brain as if biting it with acid, to ensure we will never, ever, ever, be able to forget them. -- Ali Smith
It's the word 'artful'; it's such a great word, with its dark and its light side, its art and its cunning, the craft and the crafty of it - I've been preoccupied with the word 'artful' and the twin notions of 'cornucopia' and 'pickpocket' it suggests for quite some time. -- 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
[Property] is a brilliant, chillingly revelatory piece of fiction, a work of craft, economy and such good merciless observation-one of those rare, crucial novels illuminating a history we think we know and understand so that after we've read it we'll never forget its truths. -- 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
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
Animals, Mark, have no use for nostalgia, Aunt Kenna says. It is not a tool for survival, my darling. But -- Ali Smith
Mark, shaken, realizes he has just made the terrible mistake of not just seeming to be but actually being sincere. -- 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
It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. -- Ali Smith
Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them. -- Ali Smith
She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person. -- Ali Smith
He had seemed a man with whom the right kind of dialogue would be possible. -- Ali Smith
Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen. -- 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
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
The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me. -- 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
Winter. It made things visible. But -- Ali Smith
There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in everything, everywhere we look. -- Ali Smith
Giving is fraught with danger - as is taking. -- Ali Smith
This story is true and happened once in the future long ago. -- Ali Smith
And they all died happily ever after.
A very happy ending, the littlest one said. -- Ali Smith
It's what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters. -- Ali Smith
Words words words. Words Words words. Words words Words. -- Ali Smith
When you've nothing, at least you've all of it. -- Ali Smith
Words were stories in themselves. -- Ali Smith
She unfolds the piece of paper in her hands and she reads again the story written on it. -- Ali Smith
All short stories long. -- 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
No art has ever really changed anything. -- 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
Beauty in its most completeness is never found in a single body but is something shared instead between more than one body. -- 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
Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down. -- Ali Smith
I only joke about really serious things, -- 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
The head has its confines. The head's got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons. -- 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
Imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you'd made, as if the thing you'd made became you. -- Ali Smith
No one remembering that old man.
Except, I just did, there -- Ali Smith
I lie on the floor with my head on my books and my feet up on more of my books and stare up at the ceiling with its flystuck old electric fitting and at this point in the story even the ceiling is glorious. -- Ali Smith
The still-alives. They were all crazy. -- Ali Smith
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. -- Ali Smith
I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.' -- Ali Smith
