Gliff Quotes

“One person here had been unverified for saying out loud that a war was a war when it wasn’t permitted to call it a war. Another had found herself declared unverifiable for writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide. Another had been unverified for defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe. Another had been unverified for speaking at a protest about people’s right to protest. (pp. 161-162)”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“It takes a lifetime, sometimes, to work out what anything you're doing's got to do with the real realities of living.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“We can't solve it. But we can still salve it.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“Our mother thought smartphones were liabilities. So, what you want, she’d say whenever we begged her for a smartphone or a smart anything, is to have a device that means you see everything through it, as if everything is at your fingertips and you can hold it all in the palm of one hand. It would certainly make you feel very important to yourself. What you’d be preoccupied with would be so important to you that there would be no point in you looking at anything else.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“I'm all my me's, she said. I am complete.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“A tyrant runs a country. He does this via a lot of other people doing this tyrant's work for him. They do it partly because they think he'll kill them or their families if they don't, and partly because it makes them feel powerful too.
One of the things you're not allowed to say in this country is that the tyrant is a tyrant.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“Like there was such a thing as a family of words, one that stretched across different languages all touching on each other, hitting or striking each other, acting on each other, influencing each other, agreeing with each other or throwing each other out, disturbing each other, doing all of these things at once.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“When my sister came to get me from the library the next morning I was tucked in the corner with my head on a shelf, asleep on a paperback copy of a novel called Man in the Holocene, written by someone called, I can’t remember now, something that sounded like a coffee, or a deodorant, something like Max Fresh.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“Child’s life’s as brief as a candle.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“All the people living here, including the feral children, were right now unverifiables. They were largely unverifiable because of words. One person here had been unverified for saying out loud that a war was a war when it wasn’t permitted to call it a war. Another had found herself declared unverifiable for writing online that the killing of many people by another people was a genocide. Another had been unverified for defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe. Another had been unverified for speaking at a protest about people’s right to protest.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“We sat for a while saying nothing in the bathroom. Don’t do that, I said. (She was biting a nail.) Sorry, she said. Then, a little later, she said, heart rendering. Like covering your heart in concrete at the same time as melting it and giving it up.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“Sometimes I think you’re a very old and wise person disguised as you, I said. Thanks, she said. And sometimes, I said, I think you’re one of the youngest greenest people I’ll ever know. I am all my me’s, she said. I am complete.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“Family can be more things than people say it is.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life, she said.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“The grey horse’s bones were close to its skin all over it and it seemed huge even though it was quite a small horse, the smallest one in this field.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“If only people paid more attention, she said, to what history tells us rather than all this endless congratulating ourselves for finding a new way to read it.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“And then I’ll tell you a story, I said. No, I know. You can tell me one. You’re better at it than me. What about? That’s not up to me, I said. That’ll be up to you. So. What’ll it be about? I don’t know yet, she said. When will you know? How will I know till I’m making it up? she said.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“I’m already someone, he said. No person on earth can just ‘be’ someone else.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“Every classic old horse story I’ve ever chanced upon in this brave unlibraried world deals with the bloodiness of humanity to other creatures as well as each other and more often than not ends in dutiful sadness as if the story, not totally broken, is at least broken in. (p.110)”
― Ali Smith, Gliff