Artful Quotes

“To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“(this is before we're living together, before we do the most faithful act of all, mix our separate books into one library)”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“The thing about trees is that they know what to do. When a leaf loses its colour, it's not because its time is up and it's dying, it's because the tree is taking back into itself the nutrients the leaf's been holding in reserve for it, out there on the twig, and why leaves change colour in autumn is because the tree is preparing for winter, it's filling itself with its own stored health so it can withstand the season. Then, clever tree, it literally pushes the used leaf off with the growth that's coming behind it. But because that growth has to protect itself through winter too, the tree fills the little wound in its branch or twig where the leaf was with a protective corky stuff which seals it against cold and bacteria.

Otherwise every leaf lost would be an open wound on a tree and a single tree would be covered in thousands of little wounds.

Clever trees.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“Edges are magic, too; there's a kind of forbidden magic on the borders of things, always a ceremony of crossing over, even if we ignore it or are unaware of it.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“Time is just 'one damn thing after another ', Margaret Atwood says. That sounds like conventional narrative plot. And at the end of our allotted time, we'll end up in one of those, a conventional plot I mean, unless we stipulate otherwise in our wills.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“Art is always an exchange, like love, whose giving and taking can be a complex and wounding matter, according to Michelangelo”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“Giving is fraught with danger - as is taking.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“It's about the connecting force from form to form. It's the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It's the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“EM Forster, though, saw it a little more evenhandedly: ‘when human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“Because when I think about what it was like to live with you, it was like all these things. It was like living in a poem or a picture, a story, a piece of music, when I think of it now. It was wonderful.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“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-we'd 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 we've forgotten we even know it.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“Poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, under unbearable duress, and only with the hope that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“Anyone who gives wings to another’s shoulders, and then along the way gradually spreads out a hidden net, extinguishes completely the ardent charity enkindled by love precisely where it most desires to burn.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“The twentieth century was wedded to the remembrance of things past, with Proust making the act of remembrance an art of sensory timeslip in the first texts which would become A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in 1913 and with Joyce making an epic forever out of a single passing ordinary day with the serialization of the first chapters of Ulysses not long after.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“You came back from the dead to watch tv? I said.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“This is part empathy, part thievery. Empathy, in art, is art’s part-exchange with us, its inclusivity, at once a kindness, a going beyond the self, and a pickpocketing of our responses, which is why giving and taking are bound up with the goods, with the gods, with respect, with deep-seated understanding about the complex cultural place where kindness, thievery, bartering, and gift-giving all meet, make their exchanges, and by exchange reveal real worth.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“I’d laughed when I’d seen Walter Benjamin’s name, because, much like my brother used to shout when we were kids in the back of the car and we were driving south, Ten points to the first person who can see the Forth Road Bridge, or my father when he was teaching me to drive, Ten points if you can hit that woman crossing the road, what you used to say when you’d make me come with you to those boring conferences was, Ten points to the first person who hears someone say the words Walter Benjamin.”
― Ali Smith, Artful

“Then: how can a birthday mean nothing? Then: a reminder that time will tell. Then this phrase: item of mortality: three words that mean a baby, a person; more—the item of mortality could mean the whole book, like I was somehow holding an item of mortality in my hands. Then: this world of sorrow. When I read those words I felt again the weight of my own sorrow, the world I carried on my own back; and at exactly the same time the fact that someone somewhere sometime else had thought of the world as a world of sorrow too made the weight on my own back feel a bit better.”
― Ali Smith, Artful