Quotes from Ali Smith

Regrets when you're dead? A past when you're dead? Is there never any escaping the junkyard of the self?

See how it's deep in our animal nature, Daniel said. Not to see what's happening right in front of our eyes.

I look at the shut door. Houses change when people come in and out of them. Even the radio sounds different with just me here; this whole house and all the air in it is practically reeling with your going, even though it's just a simple going, an everyday off-to-work kind of going. I am far too sesnsitive. Something will have to be done about such sensitivity.

It's alright to forget, you know. 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 rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we'd never sleep ever again.

I have always believed in not compromising the form the drama takes by underestimating what its natural potential offers.

He also knows he is and will be being recorded by CCTV cameras on both sides of the station. He knows these are the kinds of cameras that don't know anything, don't show anything beyond surface. He knows that what they do is the stupid new way of knowing everything.

where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we're supposed to be seeing.

She was living in a time when historically it was permissible to smile like that above the face of someone who had died a violent death.

Once it would have been a year's worth of news. But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.

Her father was stern. Her father disapproved. Her father had very strong reservations...Half Belgian, half Persian, staunch British conservative, he'd seen the Himalayas and Harrogate and had chosen accountancy.

An idiolect. That's what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He's been too blithe, he'd forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.

What's the answer, according to you, to life's mysteries? she says. The answer is a question, the man says still sitting uninvited to her table. And the question is, Into whose myth do we choose to buy?

The Daily Telegraph reported next day on how the local authorities were apologizing for not having given enough notice about the film unit's plans to people who lived in the city, and how public confusion and offence had soon shifted to a mass taking of selfies.

It feels a little dangerous, to be so close to fairy tale.

It isn't a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We've got to come up with a better answer.

His little sister is brilliant. She is at her desk deep in a book, half-opened books all over her desk, all over the floor and the bed. She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.

This story is true and happened once in the future long ago.

their nineteen-sixties with the flowers in the guns and their summers of love, as if all we'd had was winter, all we'd had was rations. Just very good at keeping quiet, is what we were. We had to be. It was the way. Them with their jet-age.

No art has ever really changed anything.

Friends are always pretty, even when they're not.

I don't know, her mother says. I don't know much about it. It was quite hard to find out anything. But I'm finding it quite enjoyable, not knowing.

Then the three minutes of black and white are over and what's left is the story of human beings and air, something we hardly ever notice or think about, something we couldn't live without.

The days are unexpectedly mild. It doesn't feel that far from summer, not really, if it weren't for the underbite of the day, the lacy creep of the dark and the damp at its edges, the plants calm in the folding themselves away, the beads of the condensation on the webstrings hung between things.

So that is what history is, people and places that disappear, or are beheaded, or get damaged or nearly do, and things and places and people that get tortured and burned and so on. But this does not mean that history is not the unseen things as well.