Quotes by 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 well probably find out – and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out – what happened. And if we dont, we feel cheated.

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 well find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened.

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 wasnt here at all. Then you phoned.

What, the Great War? in which your great-grandfather, who happened to be my grandfather, was gassed in the trenches not once, but twice? Which meant he and your great-grandmother were very poor, because he was too ill to work and died young? And meant I inherited his weak lungs? Not relevant to us? her mother says. And then the break-up of the Balkans, and the start of the territorial trouble in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the civil unrest in Ireland, and the shifts of power in Russia, and the power shifts in the Ottoman empire, and the bankruptcy, economic catastrophe and social unrest in Germany, all of which played a huge part in the rise of Fascism and in the bringing about of another war in which, as it happens, your own grandmother and grandfather--who happened to be my mother and father--both fought when they were just two or three years older than you? Not relevant? To us?

And they all lived happily ever after, until they died.

She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.

Cause nobodys 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.

Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?

She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person.

It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, even though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume its there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself youd have to add the equivalent describing word and thats how youd know. The black girl ran across the park.

It is perhaps rather fine, after all, being dead. Highly underrated in the modern western world.

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.

Maybe its easier to talk to someone who wont ever actually hear what you say.

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.

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.

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

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 isnt authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending.

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.

“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.”

“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.”