Quotes from Ali Smith

April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective. Pass any flowering bush or tree and you can't not hear it, the buzz of the engine, the new life already at work in it, time's factory.

The world order was changing and what was truly new, here and there… was that the people in power were self-servers who'd no idea about and felt no responsibility towards history.

The ideal woman, a kind of faithful slave, who administers without a word of complaint and certainly no payment, who speaks only when spoken to and is a jolly good chap. But a revolution is on the way, all over the country young girls are starting and shaking and if they terrify you they mean to

Never mind literal climate change, there's been a whole seasonal shift. It's like walking in a blizzard all the time just trying to get to what's really happening beyond the noise and hype.

And he looked at the oil out of coffee beans, and at frogspawn, and, and anyway now we know what microbes are and what cells are and that the naked human eye can only see a fraction of what is actually there. And that this - (the spill of water on the table) – is full of life we can't see, and just because we can't see it doesn't mean it isn't. It really really is.

All of this information flashes through George's head in that fraction of a second it takes to do the single swivel round towards H in her mother's chair and say the words: It's my mother's study. Cool, H says.

Ha, he says. Well. Crazy weather out You're missing nothing, Pad. One of the worst springs I can remember. Snow up to here just two there. weeks ago. Minus seven. And now this. Twenty nine degrees. You're wrong, she says. One of the loveliest springs I've known. Plants couldn't wait to get going. All that cold. All this green.

560My mother went on and on about it. Actually she went off on a tangent, I told her about your mother at one point and she went all (H starts doing a lightly French accent) it is not fair for your friend, she is not going to get the important boredoms and mournings and melancholies that are her due and are owing to her just from being the age that she is, for now it will be interrupted by real mournings and real melancholies...

Certain white people in particular can look right through young people and also black and mixed race people like we aren't here.

No era viejo, ella había acertado. Nadie verdaderamente viejo se sentaría con las piernas cruzadas o abrazándose las rodillas de ese modo. Los viejos solo podían sentarse como si los hubiese paralizado una pistola paralizante).

it's like the people in the play are living in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other's worlds. But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what's happening right next to their ears and eyes, they'd see it's the same play they're all in, the same world, that they're all part of the same story.

Los amigos de toda la vida, dijo él. A veces nos pasamos toda la vida esperándolos.

And now for our entertainment when we want humiliation we've got reality TV instead, Iris says. And soon instead of reality TV we'll have the President of the United States.

before she had died she had been young, like him, and not yet been onced by life. Today

gold mould as if blisters of the body can become precious metals.

Real strength was a matter of sensing something alive in you bigger than just your own breathing.

Art in nature.

The act of saying I forgive you, it's like saying you are less than me and I have the moral or superior upper hand.

Who needs a school homework assignment to be trustworthy? Sacha said.

The world is full of people looking for meaning in the shape of a bird not native to this country turning up in this country after all.

She unfolds the piece of paper in her hands and she reads again the story written on it.

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.

I don't care what language the time passes in, the girl says. So long as it passes.

Christmas is probably too bourgeois.