Girl Meets Boy Quotes

“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

“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

“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 proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“I wished I was old. I was tired of being so young, so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the Internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I'd try to click on me, try to go any deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or MySpace, it was as if I knew that one morning I'd wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of I existed any more, because the servers all over the world were all down. And that's how rootless. And that's how fragile.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light, like a river seen from a train makes a channel of sky etch itself deep into a landscape. I had not really known I could be so much more than myself. I had not known another body could do this to mine.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“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.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“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.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“I went outside mournful, and I hit pure air.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“I went outside mournful, and I hit pure air. The air was full of birdsong. I went outside expecting rain but it was sunny, it was so suddenly, so openly sunny, with so sharp a spring light coming off the river, that I went down the side of the riverbank and sat in among the daffodils.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“I got up to get us a drink of water and as I stood in the kitchen in the early morning light, running the water out of the tap, I looked out at the hills at the back of the town, at the trees on the hills, at the bushes in the garden, at the birds, at the brand new leaves on a branch, at a cat on a fence, at the bits of wood that made the fence, and I wondered if everything I saw, if maybe every landscape we casually glanced at, was the outcome of an ecstasy we didn't even know was happening, a love-act moving at a speed slow and steady enough for us to be deceived into thinking it was just everyday reality.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“If my life was a story, I said, it’d start like this:
Before she left, my mother gave me a compass. But when I tried to use it, when I was really far out, lost at sea, the compass didn’t work. So I tried the other compass, the one my father had given me before he left. But that compass was broken too.
So you looked out across the deep waters, Robin said. And you decided, by yourself, and with the help of a clear night and some stars, which way was north and which was south and which way was east and which was west. Yes?
Yes, I said.
Then I said it again. Yes.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“And that’s the message. That’s it. That’s all.
Nothing more than what happens when things come together, when hydrogen, say, meets oxygen, or a story from then meets a story from now, or stone meets water meets girl meets boy meets bird meets hand meets wing meets bone meets light meets dark meets eye meets word meets world meets grain of sand meets thirst meets hunger meets need meets dream meets real meets same meets different meets death meets life meets end meets beginning all over again, the story of nature itself, ever-inventive, making one thing out of another, and one thing into another, and nothing lasts, and nothing’s lost, and nothing ever perishes, and things can always change, because things will always change, and things will always be different, because things can always be different.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“It's what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“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

“I wished I was old. I was tired of being so young, so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I’d try to click on me, try to go any deeper when it can to the meaning of ‘I’, I mean deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or MySpace, it was as if I knew that one morning I’d wake up and try to log on to find that not even _that_ version of ‘I’ existed any more, because the servers all over the world were all down. And that’s how rootless. And that’s how fragile. And what would poor Anthea do then, poor thing?”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“The thing is, Iphis and Ianthe had actually, for real, very really, fallen in love. Did their hearts hurt? I said. Did they think they were underwater all the time? Did they feel scoured by light? Did they wander about not knowing what to do with themselves?”
― Ali Smith , Girl Meets Boy

“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

“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

“(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

“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

“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

“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

“The grey area, I'd discovered, had been misnamed: really the grey area was a whole other spectrum of colours new to the eye.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“The river was lined with churches, as if to prove that decent people still believed in things. Maybe they did. Maybe they thought it made a difference, all the ritual marryings and christenings and confirmings and funereals, all the centuries of asking, in their different churches each filled with the same cold air off the mountains and the Firth, for things to reveal themselves as having meaning after all, for some proof the world was held in larger hands than human hands. I’d be happy, myself, I thought as I sat in the wet grass with my hands in the warmth still inside my shoes, just to know that the world was a berry in the beak of a bird, or was nothing more than a slab of sloped grassy turf like this, fished out of cosmic nothingness one beautiful spring morning by some meaningless creature or other. That would do. That would do fine. It would be fine, just to know that for sure.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

“We’ve got the taste of buttered toast in our mouths. At least, I assume we all have it, since we’ve all been eating the same toast, well, different bits of the same toast. Then I start to worry. Because what if we all taste things differently? What if each bit of toast tastes completely different? After all, the two bits I’ve eaten definitely tasted a bit different even from each other. I look round the room, from head to head of each of us. Then I taste the taste in my own mouth again.”
― Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy