Anna Smaill Quotes

#1. Deep in the drilled-in mud of the fields behind me, our bulbs are wrapped in their brittle skins with their messages of color stored inside. Blue iris, yellow crocus, tulips of all colors.

Anna Smaill

#2. What is it, the difference between ordinary people and those with genius? Not just ordinary people either. Intelligent people, sensitive ones, exceptionally talented ones. Even people like Sonja who give everything and then more, who work harder than seems possible on the thing they love.

Anna Smaill

#3. When the music comes, you try to see it shining between your eyes. Like threads stretched taut and the notes as colored beads threaded on. When you get very good, it's as if you can see inside the music, through it. You bring the music alive, bring it into being. As if you're the one composing.

Anna Smaill

#4. The man comes closer. I recognise him. It's Johannes, who teaches rudiments and solfege at the local school. I raise my hand in the notes for greeting and he carves out the response. So crisp and clear I can't help feeling the implied correction of my slumped tones.

Anna Smaill

#5. It is an awful knowledge. Even if what you are coming up out of is a nightmare, waking is hard. When you were deep inside the dream, all was decided for you. Out in the morning is something else altogether. Something you have to choose for yourself.

Anna Smaill

#6. When you don't grasp something or remember something, I think your mind at last says, "Okay," and part of it accepts this. In the end your mind gets to welcome that deadening. that's what I believe anyway. Half of our memoryloss is by choice.

Anna Smaill

#7. ...after a while her mood flares. She lights her words with it and flicks them at me.

Anna Smaill

#8. I want to show an all of us. And I want the story to hold and keep our separate strangeness and the broken pieces of all the human beings that do not fit.

Anna Smaill

#9. That difference, that indefinable difference between talent and genius. It is as fine as hair, invisible to the eye and even, most of the time, to the ear. But in her face when she looks at her brother, I see that it may as well be a huge uncrossable chasm.

Anna Smaill

#10. A door in my chest opens with an unfamiliar happiness. In my arms, there is an echo of his nearness, what it felt like to hold him.

Anna Smaill

#11. How without mercy and without blame we have all of us been. And how careless to have misplaced so much.

Anna Smaill

#12. You can't force them [objectmemories] to flower either. Like bulbs, they show their secrets in their own time.

Anna Smaill

#13. What you'll learn, Simon, is that people do not want to know the truth. You might think you are doing them a great favour to bring it to them. But even if you put it right on their doorstep, nobody will thank you for it. They'll throw it away. Throw it in your face. Most people prefer to forget.

Anna Smaill

#14. They are afraid of bodies. Because bodies betray us. They grow and they change and they love and they leak and they get tired and sick and old and they shake and die.
They are afraid of these things because they are afraid of discord.

Anna Smaill

#15. But some memories are more important than others,' she says. 'Because some memories belong to more than just one other person...Some memories tell us about who we are. They need to be kept safe so that things can change for all of us

Anna Smaill