Quotes from Ali Smith

I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light, like a river seen from a train makes a channel of sky etch itself deep into a landscape. I had not really known I could be so much more than myself. I had not known another body could do this to mine.

Words are themselves organisms, ...

You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.

There's always, there'll always be, more story. That's what story is.

And they all lived happily ever after, until they died.

Abba songs, as anyone who knows knows, are constructed, technically and harmonically, so as to physically imprint the human brain as if biting it with acid, to ensure we will never, ever, ever, be able to forget them.

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

Edges are magic, too; there's a kind of forbidden magic on the borders of things, always a ceremony of crossing over, even if we ignore it or are unaware of it.

He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. But he really looked like a girl. She was the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen in my life.

Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, he said, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it.

I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored.

Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.

We have to hope that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.

It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.

Finally she lets herself think about how it feels: to be so frightened that you almost can't breathe to speed so fast and be so completely out of control to know the meaning of helplessness to spin across a shining space knowing any moment you might end up hurt, but likewise, all the same, like plus wise you just might not.

In fact all he can remember of her is that he sent her a postcard he wished afterwards he'd kept for himself.

Somehow this wasn't the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren't relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.

How are you feeling? Mrs Rock said. I'm okay, George said. I think it's because I don't think I am. You're okay because you don't think you're okay? Mrs Rock said. Feeling, George said. I think I'm okay because I don't think I'm feeling.

I wished that my own bones were unbound, I wished they were mingling, picked clean by fish, with the bones of another body, a body my bones and heart and soul had loved with unfathomable certainty for decades, and both of us down deep now, lost to everything but the fact of bare bones on a dark seabed.

Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We've got to come up with a better answer.

Winter. It made things visible.

Imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you'd made, as if the thing you'd made became you.

Cut this tree I'm living in down. Hollow its trunk out. Make me all over again, with what you scooped out of its insides. Slide the new me back inside the old trunk. Burn me. Burn the tree. Spread the ashes, for luck, where you want next year's crops to grow. Birth me and the tree Next summer's sun Midwinter guarantee

Well, truth's like the sun. Look right at it and that's your eyes ruined for life.