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 for decades, and both of us down deep now, lost to everything but the fact of bare bones on a dark seabed.

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we dont know.

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.

Got a light? See? Careful. Im everything you ever dreamed.

Its so warm its almost friendly. A friendly work of art. Ive never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. Its never sentimental. Its generous, but its sardonic too. And whenever its sardonic, a moment later its generous again.

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 gravestone-and youll be made shinier, brighter, by it. In this form it will-and therefore you will-avoid destruction by war, history, time generally; itll even keep you alive after death; in fact itll form a place for you to live, not die, where youll be seen in the eyes of and the context of this love right to the end of time.

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 everything-wed still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognised line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after weve forgotten we even know it.

Always be reading something, he said. Even when were not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

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 theyd really lost. All across the country, people felt theyd really won. All across the country, people felt theyd done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland. All across the country, people looked up Google: Irish Passport Applications. All across the country, people called each other cunts. All across the country, people felt unsafe. All across the country, people were laughing their heads off. All across the country, people felt legitimised. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing. All across the country, people felt like they counted for nothing. All across the country, people had pinned their hopes on it. All across the country, people waved flags in the rain. All across the country, people drew swastika graffiti. All across the country, people threatened other people. All across the country, people told people to leave. All across the country, the media was insane. All across the country, politicians lied. All across the country, politicians fell apart. All across the country, politicians vanished...

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 as if it unknotted itself from itself, like the hull of a ship hitting rock, giving way, and the ship that I was opened up inside me and in came the ocean.He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.But he looked really like a girl.She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.

This isn’t fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.

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 of a single space in a car park, refusing to come out of it, and all around her or him the whole world, beautiful, various, waiting?

Words are themselves organisms, ...

Words were stories in themselves.

Because, George thought as she sat there with her eyes closed back before Christmas in Mrs Rocks self-consciously comfortable chair in the counselling office, how can it be that theres an advert on TV with dancing bananas unpeeling themselves in it and teabags doing a dance, and her mother will never see that advert? How can that advert exist and her mother not exist in the world?She didnt say it out loud, though, because there wasnt a point.It isnt about saying.It is about the hole which will form in the roof through which the cold will intensify and after which the structure of the house will begin to shift, like it ought, and through which George will be able to lie every night in bed watching the black sky.

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

But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. Theyre foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.

Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?

Believe me. Everything is meant.