Top 100 Ali Smith Quotes
#1. Believe me. Everything is meant.
Ali Smith
#2. 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
#3. My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.
Ali Smith
#4. A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book.
Ali Smith
#5. I'm good at the real and the true and the beautiful and can do With some skill and With or without flattery the Place where all 3 meet ...
Ali Smith
#6. And after that, I watched our house collapse in on itself and I spent some time lying in the rubble. Then I vanished completely. I wasn't here at all. Then you phoned.
Ali Smith
#7. I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.
Ali Smith
#8. Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.
Ali Smith
#9. But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened.
Ali Smith
#11. Even things which seem separate and finished are infinitely connected and will infinitely connect. This connection happens as soon as you let it, as soon as you engage - as soon as you even attempt to engage.
Ali Smith
#12. I was at the tail end of the family. The next brother along was already seven years older than me. I remember growing up by myself, playing games by myself.
Ali Smith
#13. You hold me very tight in under my clothes, and if there's a library anywhere near then someone just removed its roof, the shelves just flooded with the sun and all the old books just remembered what it means to be bound in skin and to have a spine.
Ali Smith
#14. 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
#15. Well, truth's like the sun. Look right at it and that's your eyes ruined for life.
Ali Smith
#16. 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
#17. Yeah, but the thing I particularly like about the word but, now that I think about it, is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting.
Ali Smith
#18. 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
#19. Before she had died she had been young, like him, and not yet been onced by life. Today
Ali Smith
#20. 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
#21. Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.
Ali Smith
#22. I'm blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that's almost never what our friendships are about. And every writer I've ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it's important not to mix the two up.
Ali Smith
#23. Above the keyhole the door has a latch. It is pretending to be an authentic old latch. The door is pretending to be an authentic old door. Maybe everything there is isn't authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending.
Ali Smith
#24. There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.
Ali Smith
#25. 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
#26. Whole worlds open up when we start a conversation.
Ali Smith
#27. The whole point is, we can forget. It's important that we forget some things. Otherwise we'd go round the world carrying a hotload of stuff we just don't need.
Ali Smith
#28. Words words words. Words Words words. Words words Words.
Ali Smith
#29. How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on 'Top of the Pops' singing 'Life on Mars.'
Ali Smith
#30. To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.
Ali Smith
#31. She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person.
Ali Smith
#32. We all know our dates of birth but ... every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it is the other date the death date.
Ali Smith
#33. - But I'm telling you. I swear, music. I get home, and it's the music again. Every night I hear it playing. I don't know what to do about it.
- Have you tried dancing to it?
Ali Smith
#34. It is like her mother has been struck by - what? Lightening. Her mother has lightened up since the moment they landed in this country and the plane door opened and the warmer air came in.
The moment they walked into this room she lightened even more
Ali Smith
#35. Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.
Ali Smith
#36. Did I? Daniel said. While we're here. Well. While we're here, let's just always hold out hope for the person who says it.
Says what, Mr Gluck? Elisabeth said.
Sure you want war? Daniel said.
Ali Smith
#37. (they were always, she was always, gloriously, just a little late, it made everything worth hurrying for),
Ali Smith
#38. Words were stories in themselves.
Ali Smith
#39. Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.
Ali Smith
#40. And they all died happily ever after.
A very happy ending, the littlest one said.
Ali Smith
#41. (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
#42. The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.
Ali Smith
#43. Remember you must live.
remember you most love.
remainder you mist leaf.
Ali Smith
#44. Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
Ali Smith
#45. Say that the berries on a tree fermented / say that some birds ate them got drunk demented / couldn't fly straight flew straight into instead / wall of an office block and fell down dead / down on the pavement people undeterred / stepping over the mound of broken bird
Ali Smith
#46. 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
#47. Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, he said, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it.
Ali Smith
#48. That there can still be as-yet untranslated fiction by [Tove] Jansson is simultaneously an aberration and a delight, like finding buried treasure.
Ali Smith
#49. [ ... ] its small squares of fast-passing light, the early evening windows of the lives of hundreds of others.
Ali Smith
#50. Beauty in its most completeness is never found in a single body but is something shared instead between more than one body.
Ali Smith
#51. Okay, I said. As long as I've got you here, we're going to use and appreciate this present moment. Because I wish, and I've wished a thousand times since you went, that we'd known it was the present, and that we were living in it.
Ali Smith
#52. Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.
Ali Smith
#53. When you've nothing, at least you've all of it.
Ali Smith
#54. 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
#55. You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, 'I'm a writer,' it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.
Ali Smith
#56. I wouldn't call my work Modernist. I would rust if I try to think about labels. I'd feel like the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz.'
Ali Smith
#57. [Property] is a brilliant, chillingly revelatory piece of fiction, a work of craft, economy and such good merciless observation-one of those rare, crucial novels illuminating a history we think we know and understand so that after we've read it we'll never forget its truths.
Ali Smith
#58. 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
#59. She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.
Ali Smith
#60. Here was all about the visible-invisible borders, the thin lines between here and gone, then and now, here and there, random and meant, big and small.
Ali Smith
#61. And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see it?
Ali Smith
#62. The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks.
Ali Smith
#63. So always risk your skin, she said, and never fear losing it, cause it always does some good one way or another when the powers that be deign to take it off us.
Ali Smith
#64. Animals, Mark, have no use for nostalgia, Aunt Kenna says. It is not a tool for survival, my darling. But
Ali Smith
#65. No art has ever really changed anything.
Ali Smith
#66. Abba songs, as anyone who knows knows, are constructed, technically and harmonically, so as to physically imprint the human brain as if biting it with acid, to ensure we will never, ever, ever, be able to forget them.
Ali Smith
#67. Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
Ali Smith
#68. Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
Ali Smith
#69. Gold mould as if blisters of the body can become precious metals.
Ali Smith
#70. You're going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history. Otherwise there'll be no good hope for your own grand truths and no good truths for your own grandchildren.
Ali Smith
#71. So that is what history is, people and places that disappear, or are beheaded, or get damaged or nearly do, and things and places and people that get tortured and burned and so on. But this does not mean that history is not the unseen things as well.
Ali Smith
#72. It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.
Ali Smith
#73. There was once a child whose mother fell asleep. The end.
Is that it? I said
What else do you need to know? you said.
Can't you tell me a little more about them? I said. (I was beginning to despair of your storytelling technique.)
Ali Smith
#74. It was cruel, though, to want to, and tempting, so I'd become an expert at almost.
Ali Smith
#75. Words are themselves organisms, ...
Ali Smith
#76. It's the word 'artful'; it's such a great word, with its dark and its light side, its art and its cunning, the craft and the crafty of it - I've been preoccupied with the word 'artful' and the twin notions of 'cornucopia' and 'pickpocket' it suggests for quite some time.
Ali Smith
#77. All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.
Ali Smith
#78. The still-alives. They were all crazy.
Ali Smith
#79. That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature.
Ali Smith
#80. Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.
Ali Smith
#81. I only joke about really serious things,
Ali Smith
#82. 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
#83. Giving is fraught with danger - as is taking.
Ali Smith
#84. She was working at her computer in her office, doing admin, which is short for administration, which is short for migraine-stimulant.
Ali Smith
#85. There was once, and there was only once; once was all there was.
Ali Smith
#86. It's so warm it's almost friendly. A friendly work of art. I've never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. It's never sentimental. It's generous, but it's sardonic too. And whenever it's sardonic, a moment later it's generous again.
Ali Smith
#87. Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.
Ali Smith
#88. Everybody turns to look at him. It is quite frightening.
Ali Smith
#89. Winter. It made things visible.
Ali Smith
#90. It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.
Ali Smith
#91. 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
#92. Mark, shaken, realizes he has just made the terrible mistake of not just seeming to be but actually being sincere.
Ali Smith
#93. What I know most is that the difference between us is what makes us interesting and attractive and problematic and exciting and vital to each other. Give me difference over indifference any day.
Ali Smith
#94. A game one of my sisters will play with me in my first year of being alive is called Good Baby, Bad Baby. This consists of being told I am a good baby until I smile and laugh, then being told I am a bad baby until I burst into tears. This training will stand me in good stead all through my life.
Ali Smith
#95. This story is true and happened once in the future long ago.
Ali Smith
#96. No one remembering that old man.
Except, I just did, there
Ali Smith
#97. It's what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.
Ali Smith
#98. Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.
Ali Smith
#99. I cannot tell a lie. It was me who
chopped down the cherry tree. Now that
I've been so honest, make me a
precedent. No, not president. I said
precedent.
Ali Smith
#100. She unfolds the piece of paper in her hands and she reads again the story written on it.
Ali Smith
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
