Quotes from Ali Smith

It's all right to forget, you know, he said. It's good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we'd never sleep ever again.

Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.

What if . . . instead of saying, this border divides these places. We said, this border unites these places. This border holds together these two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible.

What I do when it distresses me that there's something I can't remember, is. Are you listening? Yes, Elisabeth said through the crying. I imagine that whatever it is I've forgotten is folded close to me, like a sleeping bird. What kind of bird? Elisabeth said. A wild bird, Daniel said. Any kind. You'll know what kind when it happens. Then, what I do is, I just hold it there, without holding it to tight, and I let it sleep. And that's that.

beauty in its most completeness is never found in a single body but is something shared instead between more than one body.

There was this different quality to the light even only four days past the shortest day; the shift, the reversal, from increase of darkness to increase of light, revealed that a coming back of light was at the heart of midwinter equally as much as the waning of light.

So always risk your skin, she said, and never fear losing it, cause it always does some good one way or another when the powers that be deign to take it off us.

Time is just 'one damn thing after another ', Margaret Atwood says. That sounds like conventional narrative plot. And at the end of our allotted time, we'll end up in one of those, a conventional plot I mean, unless we stipulate otherwise in our wills.

It is perhaps rather fine, after all, being dead. Highly underrated in the modern western world.

Everywhere's a here, isn't it?

Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.

He thinks about how, whatever being alive is, with all its pasts and presents and futures, it is most itself in the moments when you surface from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness that you didn't even know you were at, and break the surface.

Now what we don't want is Facts. What we want is bewilderment. What we want is repetition. What we want is repetition.

Things can change over time, what looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open, and what's unthinkable and impossible at one time will easily be possible in another.

Words words words. Words Words words. Words words Words .

Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?

This isn't fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.

How very disappointing truth is sometimes.

The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we've got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people's rage for its own political expediency. Which is a grand old fascist trick if ever I saw one, and a very dangerous game to play. And what's happening in the United States is directly related, and probably financially related.

The power of the lie, Daniel said. Always seductive to the powerless.

Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

With a bit of help and a bit of luck, we get to be more than the one thing or the nothing that history'd have us be. We're only here by the grace and the work of others. I am anyway. Here's to those others who helped, that's my prayer when I go to my bed, and may I be such an other to a good many myself.

I went outside mournful, and I hit pure air.

cruelty to animals will get you punished but cruelty to humans will get you promotion.