Quotes from Ali Smith

I don't know that I believe in gods enough to ask of them. But if they exist and I might be so bold as to say, excuse me, if you're there can you please make that sunlit summer day longer and these dark days shorter

it's the best fish I've ever caught, that fish I didn't catch, cause it's a fish that will always be with me now and never be eaten, it'll never die, that fish I'll never land.

Above the keyhole the door has a latch. It is pretending to be an authentic old latch. The door is pretending to be an authentic old door. Maybe everything there is isn't authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending.

Ez egy olyan kor, amikor az emberek mondanak egymásnak dolgokat, és az egészbÅ'l soha nem lesz párbeszéd.

Reason not the need, the man says. Need not the reason.

because looking is just the start of understanding, just its surface, the top layer of any understanding, the girl is saying

Myself, I thought about you the whole time. Even when I wasn't thinking about you, I thought about you.

But that's summer for you. Summer's like walking down a road just like this one, heading towards both light and dark. Because summer isn't just a merry tale. Because there's no merry tale without darkness.

You can't expect to live in the world like the world's your private myth.

There's always, there'll always be, more story. That's what story is...It's the never-ending leaf-fall.

Are we at mercy of technology or is technology at mercy of us?

Well, the naivety and the vitriol were always there all along, Iris says. The internet's just made them both more visible. That's maybe a good thing.

I would rather die and to go hell than wake up one day and find myself an inmate in that guesthouse of gone minds, gone things, bad carpets, furniture that needs permission.

The trees are revealing their structures. There's the catch of fire in the air. All the souls are out marauding. But there are roses, there are still roses. In the damp and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there's a wide-open rose, still.

there were yellow flowers dropping off the trees : they landed with a sound : who knew flowers had a voice?

Sometimes, he says, we don't know why people do what they do. But we can only do our best, the best we can do, in response, and try to be as good-humoured as possible while we do it.

The third person is another pair of eyes. The third person is a presentiment of God. ...... a way to tell the story. It's a box for the endless music that's there between people, waiting to be played.

Fear is one of my belongings. Fear will always be a part of any belonging, anywhere, that I ever do, for the rest of my life. I fought hard, to get here to your country. And the first thing you did when I arrived was hand me a letter saying, "Welcome to a country in which you are not welcome. You are now a designated unwelcome person with whom we will do as we please.

You can't just ask strangers to drive you up and down the country. This is the twenty first century. Strangers are more dangerous than ever; we've never been more dangerous.

What if the girl says. Instead of saying, this border divides places. We said, this border holds together two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible.

We move from one invisibility to another.

Whatever age you are, he says. You still die young.

Elisabeth skims the day's paper on her phone to catch up on the usual huge changes there've been in the last half hour.

And they all died happily ever after. A very happy ending," the littlest one said.