How to be Both

by Ali Smith

Can you do both?

tenable on condition that he could never have me, that I was never to be had, and that someone else, anyone else, saying out loud to him what I was, other than painter, broke this condition, since those words in themselves mean the inevitability, the being had.

how would I paint such opaqueness? What kind or what making of white would it take?

It was all : it was nothing : it was more than enough. Fine.

That blossom will smell good to those who can smell blossom. How the air throws it into a dance.

girls got less attention when it came to colours and pictures, which meant the loss of many a good painter out of nothing but blind habit : but his wife did not want her girls to have the life of painters).

It’s yours, he said. If you’re leaving my tutelage, then I give into your care what little I still have of your child self. It also holds your mother in it, who will have helped you fashion it, cause you were very young when you wrote this and the sentences have her turn of phrase about them, as well as – look, here, here and here – her habit of putting these 2 dots between clauses where a breath should come.