Quotes from Ali Smith

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn't there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.

A man interested in the meaning of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.

Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about. Then the seedheads rattle, the seeds fall out. Then there's even more language waiting to come up.

When the state is not kind, then the people are fodder.

I fall in love. More figuratively speaking, I am walking along the road one day when out of nowhere I am struck by lightning.

Stop thieving my tragedy

Mind and matter are mysterious and, when they come together, bounteous.

No one remembering that old man. Except, I just did, there

I'm everything that makes everything. I'm everything that unmakes everything. I'm fire. I'm flood. I'm pestilence. I'm the ink, the paper, the grass, the tree, the leaves, the leaf, the greenness in the leaf. I'm the vein in the leaf. I'm the voice that tells no story.

Giving is fraught with danger - as is taking.

Plenty more birds in the sea, the man said. Plenty more plastic bottles.

It is like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with. It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue. It is the end of dialogue.

She had entered him like he was water. Like he was a dictionary and she was a word he hadn't known was in him. Or she had entered him more simply, like he was a door and she opened him, leaving him standing ajar as she walked straight in.

Words were stories in themselves.

I went outside mournful, and I hit pure air. The air was full of birdsong. I went outside expecting rain but it was sunny, it was so suddenly, so openly sunny, with so sharp a spring light coming off the river, that I went down the side of the riverbank and sat in among the daffodils.

Nothing comic isn't serious.

There's no point in making up a world, Elisabeth said, when there's already a real world, There's just the world, and there's the truth about the world. You mean there's the truth, and there's the made-up version of it that we get told about the world, Daniel said. No. The world exists. Stories are made up, Elisabeth said. But no less true for that, Daniel said.

All short stories long.

Mess up my climate, I'll fuck with your lives. Your lives are a nothing to me. I'll yank daffodils out of the ground in December. I'll block up your front door in April with snow and blow down that tree so it cracks your roof open. I'll carpet your house with the river. But I'll be the reason your own sap's reviving. I'll mainline the light to your veins.

Art is always an exchange, like love, whose giving and taking can be a complex and wounding matter, according to Michelangelo

If I am destined to be happy with you here Ã¢â'¬â€œ how short is the longest Life. John Keats

In her dream, she slapped the past in its face.

its small squares of fast-passing light, the early evening windows of the lives of hundreds of others.

That's what love is, this matter of hopeful travel against the usual deeply troubling odds.