292 Quotes by Ali Smith

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

That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.

She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person.

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 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.

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.

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.

The fact is, imagine.

Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?