Companion Piece Quotes

“What a lifestyle thing life has become, I thought. We used to march in protests. We had nightmares about our eyes melting in their sockets. Now a whole new kind of communal melting of the eyes was happening in front of mine, on primetime TV, and I'd understood fully, as I stood and watched it with my mouth open, why no government was ever going to give a fuck about and no history was ever going to think it worth recording never mind bowing its head even momentarily to the deaths and fragilities of any of the millions and millions and millions of individual people, with their detailed generic joyful elegiac fruitful wasted nourishing undernourished common individual lives, who were suffering or dying right now or had died over the past year and a half in what was after all just the latest plague and whose gone souls swirled invisible in shifting murmurations above every everyday day that we wandered around in, below these figurations, full of what we imagined was purpose.
What is there to say to that loss?
Everything becomes trivial next to it.”
― Ali Smith, Companion Piece

“I może ta osoba zawsze czuła się osamotniona i nieco oddalona od innych, mam na myśli w towarzystwie innych ludzi, nawet gdy nie była w pobliżu morza.”
― Ali Smith, Companion Piece

“Rozmowa z kimś, kto milczy, lub czymś, co milczy, wciąż jest rozmową.
Poza tym wyobraź sobie. My z dalekiej przyszłości wciąż czytamy ten wiersz, ja tu siedzę i opowiadam ci o tym wierszu ponad tysiąc lat po jego napisaniu.
Gdy sobie pomyślę, ilekroć ktoś czyta ten wiersz, podmiot liryczny nie jest sam, nie mogę wyjść ze zdumienia i zachwytu.”
― Ali Smith, Companion Piece