Quotes from Ali Smith

She was working at her computer in her office, doing admin, which is short for administration, which is short for migraine-stimulant.

The head has its confines. The head's got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.

Funny, she says leaning against an unexpected warm place in the stone on the threshold of the church and liking the feel of it on her arm. Like, how we overload summer most out of all the seasons, I mean with our expectations of it. Nah, he says and nips the end of his rollie with a finger and thumb till it's out. Summers can take it. That's why they're called summers.

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.

I can remember once sitting opposite my brother and feeling so much love for him that it was almost as though I was knitted to him.

Seems the self you get left with on the shore, in the end, is the self that you were when you went.

I suppose the fact that we're all a lot more accustomed to blatancy these days means that blatancy itself has to get even more blatant, her mother says.

Brave old world.

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.

It's what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.

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

human beings can't be legends, being mortal

We're always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we'll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we'll be treated well by the world.

Jei žinai, kad jau pasimetei, tai reiškia, kad tikriausiai netrukus nepasimesi. Teisingai?

It is possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren't yours let you see where you are, who you are.

believe that there's no such thing as society.

he's always being told how lucky he is to have in a world where so many have so little

The twentieth century was wedded to the remembrance of things past, with Proust making the act of remembrance an art of sensory timeslip in the first texts which would become A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in 1913 and with Joyce making an epic forever out of a single passing ordinary day with the serialization of the first chapters of Ulysses not long after.

How adaptable human beings were without even realizing it, slipping blindly from state to state. One morning it was summer, the next you woke up and the whole year was over; one minute you were thirty, the next sixty, sixty next year quick as a wink, how fast it all was. How quickly and smoothly, yet how shockingly, when you thought about it, the seasons and the years gave way to each other

The seasons are meaningless. No - worse than meaningless. Paddy is rubble, and time just keeps on going. Autumn, then there'l| be winter. Then there'll be spring, and so on.

The world, she said and smiled. Bounteous. But that's what it's all about, isn't it? What? he said. The world being bounteous? No, she said. What we believe is happening.

I'm rubble too, he thinks. Just in a different form. The whole world and all its people. Rubble.

It was now free of obviousness.

Poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, under unbearable duress, and only with the hope that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.