Quotes from Ali Smith

It's about the connecting force from form to form. It's the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It's the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.

You've got to use every moment. Because in the blink of an eye it's past you, and you never get your time again. Forgive me, Grace, Charlotte said smiling, but I think that's rubbish. I believe we meet our times with our full and ready selves at whatever ages we are when the times happen to us. That's what it's all about.

I have a vision that the modern sense of being a hero is like shining a bright light on things that need to be seen.

Here's an old story so new that it's still in the middle of happening, writing itself right now with no knowledge of where or how it'll end.

Want is quite a complicated word there, because there's volo, which means I want, but it's not usually used with people. Desidero? I feel the want of, I desire. Amabo? I will love. But what if I will never love? What if I will never desire? What if I will never want? Numquam amabo?

Beauty is the true way to change things for the better. To make things better. There should be a lot more beauty in all our lives. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. There is no such thing as fake beauty. Which is why beauty is so powerful. Beauty assuages.

Best on the whole not to watch it at all : love is best felt : the acts of love are hard and disillusioning to view like this unless done by the greatest master picturemakers : otherwise the seeing of them being done and enjoyed by figurations of other people will always lock you outside them (unless your pleasure comes from taking solo pleasure or pleasure at one remove, in which case, yes, that's your pleasure).

be ready to be above and beyond the foul even when we're up to our eyes in it.

But love was terribly important. She didn't mean romantic love. Generalized sort of love.

And then what happened next, well, it happened next, and history, that other word for irony, went its own foul witty way, sang its own foul witty ditty, and the girl was the one who died young in this story.

We all mine and undermine and landmine ourselves, in our own ways, in our own time, Sophia thinks.

Because when I think about what it was like to live with you, it was like all these things. It was like living in a poem or a picture, a story, a piece of music, when I think of it now. It was wonderful.

EM Forster, though, saw it a little more evenhandedly: 'when human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other.

She has found by experience that she is in a world where female emancipation is a password and not a fact—she is beautiful, therefore she should not be clever.

Daniel in the gallery sees one of her hands, the one on the rail of the witness box, cover itself in little shoots and buds. The buds split open. There are leaves coming out of her fingers.

It was cruel, though, to want to, and tempting, so I'd become an expert at almost.

But pure joy! He'd forgotten what it feels like, to feel. To feel even just the thought of one's own bared self near someone else's beauty.

The Essentials of English, book of choice of the older boys at St. Faith's for spanking the younger boys with, leaving a particular broad-natured pain ever afterwards associated with grammar.

Yeah, but the thing I particularly like about the word but, now that I think about it, is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting.

Here was all about the visible-invisible borders, the thin lines between here and gone, then and now, here and there, random and meant, big and small.

To be included in someone's absence, it is an honour, and it asks quiet. It asks respect.

A prison is a prison, he says. Whatever you fill the time with.

The thing is, Iphis and Ianthe had actually, for real, very really, fallen in love. Did their hearts hurt? I said. Did they think they were underwater all the time? Did they feel scoured by light? Did they wander about not knowing what to do with themselves?

Maybe coincidence never means the way you want it to. Because if it did it wouldn't be coincidence, would it?