Quotes from Ali Smith

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.

If you can read the world as a construct, you can ask questions of the construct, and you can suggest ways to change the construct.

The things in life which try to pin us down are the things we have to try to work against.

I met an internationally esteemed writer at a literary party being given in her honor. She was wearing a beautiful pink, flouncy, frilly dress. I complimented her on it. She said, 'Ach, it's my nightgown. I couldn't decide what else to wear.'

She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person.

Love and the imagination are connected.

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.

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.

To be noticed is to be loved.

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineerings of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.

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.

remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.

The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks.

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.

The proper word for me," Robin Goodman says, "is me.

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.

always looking off to the side. But that's good too. It's good, to be seen past, as if you're not the only one, as if everything isn't happening just to you. Because you're not. And it isn't.

A great many men don't understand a woman full of joy, even more don't understand paintings full of joy by a woman.

Time travel is real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.

There was once, and there was only once; once was all there was.

It was all : it was nothing : it was more than enough.

When you've nothing, at least you've all of it.

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.

All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.