Autumn Quotes

“She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“I'm tired of the news. I'm tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren't, and deals so simplistically with what's truly appalling. I'm tired of the vitriol. I'm tired of anger. I'm tired of the meanness. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of how we're doing nothing to stop it. I'm tired of how we're encourageing it. I'm tired of the violence that's on it's way, that's coming, that hasn't happened yet. I'm tired of liars. I'm tired of sanctified liars. I'm tired of how those liars have let this happen. I'm tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to anymore. I'm tired of being made to feel this fearful.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“The lifelong friends, he said. We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we’d never sleep ever again.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they'd really lost. All across the country, people felt they'd really won. All across the country, people felt they'd done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland. All across the country, people looked up Google: Irish Passport Applications. All across the country, people called each other cunts. All across the country, people felt unsafe. All across the country, people were laughing their heads off. All across the country, people felt legitimised. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing. All across the country, people felt like they counted for nothing. All across the country, people had pinned their hopes on it. All across the country, people waved flags in the rain. All across the country, people drew swastika graffiti. All across the country, people threatened other people. All across the country, people told people to leave. All across the country, the media was insane. All across the country, politicians lied. All across the country, politicians fell apart. All across the country, politicians vanished...”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“We have to hope, Daniel was saying, that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Is it possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren't yours let you see where you are, who you are.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“November again. It’s more winter than autumn. That’s not mist. It’s fog. The sycamore seeds hit the glass in the wind like – no, not like anything else, like sycamore seeds hitting window glass. There’ve been a couple of windy nights. The leaves are stuck to the ground with the wet. The ones on the paving are yellow and rotting, wanwood, leafmeal. One is so stuck that when it eventually peels away, its leafshape left behind, shadow of a leaf, will last on the pavement till next spring. The furniture in the garden is rusting. They’ve forgotten to put it away for the winter. The trees are revealing their structures. There’s the catch of fire in the air. All the souls are out marauding. But there are roses, there are still roses. In the damp and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there’s a wide-open rose, still. Look at the colour of it.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Time travel is real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“A great many men don't understand a woman full of joy, even more don't understand paintings full of joy by a woman.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“There's always, there'll always be, more story. That's what story is.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Words are themselves organisms, ...”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“It's a question of how we regard our situations, how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how best to act. Hope is exactly that, that's all it is, a mater of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we're here for a mere blink of the eyes, that's all.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Who's that?

(Silence.)

Who's there?

(Silence.)

God?

Not exactly.

Well, who?

Where do I start? I'm the butterfly antenna. I'm the chemicals that paint's made of. I'm the person dead at the water's edge. I'm the water. I'm the edge. I'm the skin cells. I'm the smell of disinfectant. I'm that thing they rub against your mouth to moisten it, can you feel it? I'm soft. I'm hard. I'm glass. I'm sand. I'm a yellow plastic bottle. I'm all the plastics in the seas and in the guts of all the fishes. I'm the fishes. I'm the seas. I'm molluscs in the seas. I'm the flattened-out old beer can. I'm the shopping trolley in the canal. I'm the note on the stave, the bird on the line. I'm the stave. I'm the line. I'm spiders. I'm seeds. I'm water. I'm heart. I'm the cotton of the sheet. ..... I'm pollution. I'm a fall of horseshit on a country road a hundred years ago. ... I'm the fly .....I haven't even started telling you what I am. I'm everything that makes everything. I'm everything that unmakes everything. .... I'm the voice that tells no story.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“It's all right to forget, you know, he said. It's good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we'd never sleep ever again.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“What I do when it distresses me that there's something I can't remember, is. Are you listening?
Yes, Elisabeth said through the crying.
I imagine that whatever it is I've forgotten is folded close to me, like a sleeping bird.
What kind of bird? Elisabeth said.
A wild bird, Daniel said. Any kind. You'll know what kind when it happens. Then, what I do is, I just hold it there, without holding it to tight, and I let it sleep. And that's that.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Somehow this wasn't the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren't relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“In fact all he can remember of her is that he sent her a postcard he wished afterwards he'd kept for himself.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Cut this tree I'm living in down. Hollow its trunk out.
Make me all over again, with what you scooped out of its insides.
Slide the new me back inside the old trunk.
Burn me. Burn the tree. Spread the ashes, for luck, where you want next year's crops to grow.
Birth me and the tree
Next summer's sun
Midwinter guarantee”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“How very disappointing truth is sometimes.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“It is perhaps rather fine, after all, being dead. Highly underrated in the modern western world.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn