Quotes from Ali Smith

The painter who wanted more money because he was greedy. Or the painter who wanted more money because he knew his worth.

Life? was what you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you.

And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see?

But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff

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?

Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?

H has moved to a town in Denmark that sounds like someone Scottish saying the word whorehouse.

Dishevelled genius; because genius doesn't need to be hevelled, whatever hevelled is.

People like feeling. They like to be asked to feel. Feeling is a very powerful thing.

Later that night, when she was home and falling asleep on the couch in front of the TV, Elisabeth would remember seeing his eyes open, and how it was like that moment when you just happen to see the streetlights come on and it feels like you're being given a gift, or a chance, or that you yourself've been singled out and chosen by the moment.

Everything means something quite other now.

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.

Je houdt nooit op jezelf te zijn vanbinnen, hoe oud mensen ook denken dat je bent als ze vanbuiten naar je kijken.

across the aeons and the global distances what all the peoples of the world really have in common is so many similar ways of doing humiliating and painful things to each other.

Then she told George that the story of the minotaur was one about facing what mazes you. She made it very clear that she was using the word maze, not amaze. Then, when you'd faced it, she said, the thing to do to get out of the labyrinth was to go back the way you'd come, follow your own thread, the thread you'd left behind you, and that this had a lot to do with knowing where we come from and what our roots are –

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 probably find out – and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out – what happened. And if we don't, we feel cheated.

Like always having the sound of someone drilling a hole in a wall, not your wall, but a wall like very close to you, George said. Like, say you wake up one morning to the noise of someone along the road having work done on his or her house and you don't just hear the drilling happening, you feel it in your own house, though it's actually happening several houses away.

all I could think of all that week was flowers for breath and flowers for eyes and mouths full of flowers, armpits of them, the backs of knees, laps, groins overflowing with flowers and all I could draw was leaves and flowers, the whorls of roses, the dark foliage.

Anyone who gives wings to another's shoulders, and then along the way gradually spreads out a hidden net, extinguishes completely the ardent charity enkindled by love precisely where it most desires to burn.

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 engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.

Everybody turns to look at him. It is quite frightening.

If people think you like them, Charlotte said, well, it can go either way. There's a lot of powerplay in liking and being liked. Such a powerful connection, it's a chance to make the world bigger for someone else. Or smaller. That's always a chance we've got.

Then I wondered why on earth would anyone ever stand in the world as if standing in the cornucopic middle of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon but inside a tiny white-painted rectangle about the size of a single space in a car park, refusing to come out of it, and all around her or him the whole world, beautiful, various, waiting?

My 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...