Quotes from Ali Smith

Animals, Mark, have no use for nostalgia, Aunt Kenna says. It is not a tool for survival, my darling. But

She knew it was supposed to happen like that, that although these photographs were a signal to the eyes about something really happening, the more she looked at them the less she felt or thought. The more pictures she saw, the less they meant something that had happened to real people and the more it became possible to pile real people up like that again anywhere you wanted and have your picture taken standing smiling behind them.

Végül is elég kellemes halottnak lenni. Nagyon alulértékelik a modern nyugati világban.

Well, that's one reading of it, Elisabeth says. My own preferred reading is: free spirit arrives on earth equipped with the skill and the vision capable of blasting the tragic stuff that happens to us all into space, where it dissolves away to nothing whenever you pay any attention to the lifeforce in her pictures.

And here was a summer day, asking to be longer. As if a summer's day wasn't long enough.

It is like her mother has been struck by - what? Lightening. Her mother has lightened up since the moment they landed in this country and the plane door opened and the warmer air came in. The moment they walked into this room she lightened even more

free spirit arrives on earth equipped with the skill and the vision capable of blasting the tragic stuff that happens to us all into space, where it dissolves away to nothing whenever you pay any attention to the lifeforce in her pictures.

You can't put a pin through a summer.

The still-alives. They were all crazy.

Herbales y verbales. El lenguaje es como las amapolas. Solo requiere que algo remueva la tierra a su alrededor para que las palabras que estaban dormidas broten rojas, lozanas, meciéndose al viento. Luego las semillas caen al suelo por el movimiento de las inflorescencias. Y crean más palabras que esperan para brotar.

The nights are sooner, chillier, the light a little less each time.

Hope is exactly that, that's all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we're here for a mere blink of the eyes, that's all.

I would give anything to taste. To taste just dust. Because now that I'm nearly gone, I'm more here than I ever was. Now that I'm nothing but air, all I want is to breathe it. Now that I'm silent forever, haha, it's all words words words with me. Now that I can't just reach out and touch, it's all I want, is to.

He was clearly in love with Amber too, and this time it wasn't the usual water off the back of the duck. Instead, the duck, wounded by a hunter and bewildered because half its head had been shot way, and was still tottering about on its webby feet by the side of the pond. From the one side it looked like a duck usually looks. From the other, it was a different story.

One might imagine it'd be unpleasant, being sealed inside a tree. One might imagine, ah, pining. But the scent lightens despair. It's perhaps a little like wearing a coat of armour except much nicer, because the armour is made of a substance through which the years themselves, formative, have run.

He had seemed a man with whom the right kind of dialogue would be possible.

God almighty. It is the dregs, really, to be living in a time when even your dreams have to be post-postmodern consciouser-than-thou.

It was just that the literal meaning itself wasn´t immediately comprehensible. That doesn´t mean it didn´t mean.

Looking in the mirror suddenly she thinks that we all know our dates of birth but that every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it is the other date the death date.

She is reading whatever it is very assiduously.

None of these things is happening here. They are all happening far away, elsewhere. But they may as well be, Iris says. What does here mean anyway, I'd like to know. Everywhere's a here, isn't it?

Meanwhile, days pass.

It was huge, the room, her mother told her, with nothing in it but thousands of old sherry glasses piled inside each other. Like entering what you think is going to be history and finding endless sad fragility, Zoe says. One kick. Disaster. Careful where you tread.

It would be good to be full of holes, she says. Then all the things you can't express would maybe just flow out.