Spring Quotes

“We need to suggest the enemy within. We need enemies of the people we want their judges called enemies of the people we want their journalists called enemies of the people we want the people we decide to call enemies of the people called enemies of the people we want to say loudly over and over again on as many tv and radio shows as possible how they're silencing us. We need to say all the old stuff like it's new. We need news to be what we say it is. We need words to mean what we say they mean. We need to deny what we're saying while we're saying it. We need it not to matter what words mean.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“What if . . . instead of saying, this border divides these places. We said, this border unites these places. This border holds together these two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“Things can change over time, what looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open, and what’s unthinkable and impossible at one time will easily be possible in another.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“Now what we don’t want is Facts. What we want is bewilderment. What we want is repetition. What we want is repetition.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“..cruelty to animals will get you punished but cruelty to humans will get you promotion.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“With a bit of help and a bit of luck, we get to be more than the one thing or the nothing that history’d have us be. We’re only here by the grace and the work of others. I am anyway. Here’s to those others who helped, that’s my prayer when I go to my bed, and may I be such an other to a good many myself.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“Mess up my climate, I’ll fuck with your lives. Your lives are a nothing to me. I’ll yank daffodils out of the ground in December. I’ll block up your front door in April with snow and blow down that tree so it cracks your roof open. I’ll carpet your house with the river. But I’ll be the reason your own sap’s reviving. I’ll mainline the light to your veins.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“That’s what love is, this matter of hopeful travel against the usual deeply troubling odds.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“Stop thieving my tragedy”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“Fear is one of my belongings. Fear will always be a part of any belonging, anywhere, that I ever do, for the rest of my life. I fought hard, to get here to your country. And the first thing you did when I arrived was hand me a letter saying, "Welcome to a country in which you are not welcome. You are now a designated unwelcome person with whom we will do as we please.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“We move from one invisibility to another.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“What if the girl says. Instead of saying, this border divides places. We said, this border holds together two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“You can’t just ask strangers to drive you up and down the country. This is the twenty first century. Strangers are more dangerous than ever; we’ve never been more dangerous.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“Sometimes, he says, we don’t know why people do what they do. But we can only do our best, the best we can do, in response, and try to be as good-humoured as possible while we do it.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“because looking is just the start of understanding, just its surface, the top layer of any understanding, the girl is saying”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“He also knows he is and will be being recorded by CCTV cameras on both sides of the station. He knows these are the kinds of cameras that don’t know anything, don’t show anything beyond surface. He knows that what they do is the stupid new way of knowing everything.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“Then the three minutes of black and white are over and what's left is the story of human beings and air, something we hardly ever notice or think about, something we couldn't live without.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“April. It teaches us everything. The coldest and nastiest days of the year can happen in April. It won’t matter. It’s April. The English word for the month comes from the Roman Aprilis, the Latin aperire: to open, to uncover, to make accessible, or to remove whatever stops something from being accessible. It maybe also partly comes from the name of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, whose happy fickleness with various gods mirrors the month’s own showery-sunny fickleness. Month of sacrifice and month of playfulness. Month of restoration, of fertility-festivity. Month when the earth and the buds are already open, the creatures asleep for the winter have woken and are already breeding, the birds have already built their nests, birds that this time last year didn’t exist, busy bringing to life the birds that’ll replace them this time next year. Spring-cuckoo month, grass-month. In Gaelic its name means the month that fools mistake for May. April Fool’s Day also probably marks what was the old end of the new year celebrations. Winter has Epiphany. Spring’s gifts are different. Month of dead deities coming back to life. In the French revolutionary calendar, along with the last days of March, it becomes Germinal, the month of return to the source, to the seed, to the germ of things, which is maybe why Zola gave the novel he wrote about hopeless hope this revolutionary title. April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“It feels a little dangerous, to be so close to fairy tale.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“I have always believed in not compromising the form the drama takes by underestimating what its natural potential offers.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“The slightness of it gestures against the odds. It is like a magic spell.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“after she's dead she's going to come back every year as blossom on a tree. And if you die before me, he says, I will spend all the time I'm alive and not with you negotiating the various time differences across the world so that I can spend as much time as a man possibly can on this planet in springtime, in search of you”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“Books. Knowledge. Years of reading. All of which means? I know stuff.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“There's ways to survive these times, Doubleclick, and I think one way is the shape the telling takes.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“..even language is a kind of muteness, that everything is at an irrevocable distance; it made him wish to cross incomprehensible farnesses and yet simultaneously know he couldn’t, he was hobbled, shackled. It was the nature of things, we are all shackled, hobbled.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“Ara mateix hi ha criatures que baixen a les mines, diu ella, en aquest instant, a les 13:04 que són ara. Saps que és així. Treuen cobalt de les mines per als cotxes elèctrics que són tan respectuosos amb el medi ambient.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“Els ocells visiten els arbres sense fulles, però no sense fulles com a l'hivern; ara les branques s'enrigideixen, les puntes dels branquillons resplendeixen com la flama d'una espelma.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“De vegades soc invisible, diu la nena. En determinades botigues, restaurants, cues per comprar bitllets o supermercats, o fins i tot en llocs on de fet parlo molt fort, demano informació en una estació o coses així. La gent pot veure a través meu. Alguns blancs, en concret, poden veure a través dels joves i també dels negres o mestissos com si no hi fóssim.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“My being ineligible makes you all the more eligible.

No worries. Happy to help.

Also you’ll notice this face resembles the drawings on the posters that tell you to report anything you think looks suspicious.

Tell the police if you see anyone who looks like me, because my face is of urgent matter to your nation.

Not at all. No problem. Glad to be of service.”
― Ali Smith, Spring

“April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective.
Pass any flowering bush or tree and you can't not hear it, the buzz of the engine, the new life already at work in it, time's factory.”
― Ali Smith, Spring