292 Quotes by Ali Smith

Meanwhile, days pass.

Time is just ‘one damn thing after another ’, Margaret Atwood says. That sounds like conventional narrative plot. And at the end of our allotted time, we’ll end up in one of those, a conventional plot I mean, unless we stipulate otherwise in our wills.

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

That’s what love is, this matter of hopeful travel against the usual deeply troubling odds.

We’re always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we’ll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we’ll be treated well by the world.

Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before. Who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once.

I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light, like a river seen from a train makes a channel of sky etch itself deep into a landscape. I had not really known I could be so much more than myself. I had not known another body could do this to mine.

My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They’ve ended up in Scotland, where my father – well, both of them – will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.

That’s one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.