Ali Smith > Quotes

“Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.”
― 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

“What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself? Would words just stop being useful? Would you lose language altogether? Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks? Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife? Would the inside of your head overgrow with every word that has ever come into it, every word that has ever silently taken seed or fallen dormant? Would your own silence make other things noisier? Would all the things you’d ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you?”
― Ali Smith, There but for the

“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, Hotel World

“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, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.”
― Ali Smith, Hotel World

“What shop did this book come from? she asked. Her father was looking worried at the cooker. He always got rice wrong. I don't know, Brooksie, he said, I don't remember. That was unimaginable, not remembering where a book has come from! and where it was bought from! That was part of the whole history, the whole point, of any book that you owned! And when you picked it up later in the house at home, you knew, you just knew by looking and having it in your hand, where it came from and where you got it and when and why you'd decided to buy it.”
― Ali Smith, There but for the

“There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.”
― Ali Smith, The Accidental

“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, The First Person and Other Stories

“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, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“remember you must live.
remember you most love.
remainder you mist leaf.”
― Ali Smith, Hotel World

“The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“All short stories long.”
― Ali Smith, The First Person and Other Stories

“The novel, he was saying, was a flabby old whore.

A flabby old whore! the older man said looking delighted.

She was serviceable, roomy, warm and familiar, the younger was saying, but really a bit used up, really a bit too slack and loose.

Slack and loose! the older said laughing.

Whereas the short story, by comparison, was a nimble goddess, a slim nymph. Because so few people had mastered the short story she was still in very good shape.

...I idly wondered how many of the books in my house were fuckable and how good they'd be in bed.”
― Ali Smith, The First Person and Other Stories

“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, The Whole Story and Other Stories

“Winter. It made things visible.”
― Ali Smith, There but for the

“[...] its small squares of fast-passing light, the early evening windows of the lives of hundreds of others.”
― Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories

“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.”
― Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories

“...he had simply typed the words something beautiful into the Google images box. Up came a picture of some leaves against the sun. A picture of a blonde photoshop-smooth woman and baby sleeping. A picture of a bird. A picture of Mother Teresa. A picture of a modernist building made of shiny metal. A picture of two people sticking knives into their own hands. Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google”
― Ali Smith, There but for the

“Simt cum ceva crește în mine, la fel de mare ca și bărbăția lui. Este mânie.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“Words words words. Words Words words. Words words Words.”
― Ali Smith, There but for the

“De fapt, chiar ne comportam ca niște domnișoare. Aruncam pietrele înfășurate în săculeți de pânză pe care îi confecționasem special cu mâinile noastre pentru a pune pietrele în ei. Așa eram de domnișoare.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“Așa că s-a dus direct afară și a spart o fereastră drept cadou de ziua ei.

Halal cadou, spune Midge. De ziua mea vreau un Mini Cooper.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“Oamenii treceau pe trotuarul de deasupra. Mă priveau ca și cum aș fi fost nebună. Un pescăruș patrula pe autostradă. Mă privea ca și cum aș fi fost nebună.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“Dap, da' vezi tu, lumea se împarte acu' în oameni care cred că e distractiv să te uiți pe net la poze cu femei care o fac cu cai și câini, și oameni care nu cred asta, spune Paul.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“(Oh, Dumnezeule, sora mea care are legătură cu mine este o din aia - o ciudată, o lipsă, una căreia nu poți să i-o tragi, o sub-dezvoltată și care nici măcar nu merită să fie făcută ilegală.)”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“Acum dorești să vorbești cu una din fetele sau băieții sau ce-or fi care au scris mesajele, sau cu unul din cei șapte pitici? Pe care l-ai dori? Îl avem pe Mutulică, Hapciu', Morocănosu', Rușinosu', Somnorosu', Năsosu' și încă unul al cărui nume va trebui să-l caut pentru dumneata.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“Midge, inimioara mea dulce și cumplit de cinică, spune bunicul. Va trebui să înveți acel tip de speranță care transformă lucrurile în istorie. Altfel, n-o să existe vreo șansă pentru propriile tale adevăruri mărețe, și nici un adevăr bun pentru proprii tăi nepoți.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“She had the swagger of a girl. She blushed like a boy. She had a girl’s toughness. She has a boy’s gentleness. She was as meaty as a girl. She was as graceful as a boy. She was as brave and handsome and rough as a girl. She was as pretty and delicate and dainty as a boy. She turned boys' heads like a girl. She turned girls' heads like a boy. She made love like a boy. She made love like a girl. She was so boyish it was girlish, so girlish it was boyish, she made me want to rove the world writing our names on every tree. I had simply never found someone so right. Sometimes this shocked me so much that I was unable to speak.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn't there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google....Sure, there's a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante's inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shallows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.”
― Ali Smith, There but for the