292 Quotes by Ali Smith

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

Always be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

Words are themselves organisms,...

I’m everything that makes everything. I’m everything that unmakes everything. I’m fire. I’m flood. I’m pestilence. I’m the ink, the paper, the grass, the tree, the leaves, the leaf, the greenness in the leaf. I’m the vein in the leaf. I’m the voice that tells no story.

When pre-planned theatre is replacing politics, she said, and we’re propelled into shock mode, trained to wait for whatever the next shock will be, served up shock on a 24 hour newsfeed like we’re infants living from nipple to sleep to nipple to sleep.

Trees are great. Don't get me started about how clever they are, how oxygen-generous, how time-formed in inner cyclic circles, how they provide homes for myriad creatures, how - back when this country was covered in forests - the word for sky was an Old English word that meant 'tops of trees.'

People tend to see modernism as the opposite of a celebration. They see it as a fracturing and an art built round an absence, but it's really a celebration of our existence.

I really like jackets and tend to buy them to the detriment of my need of all the other items.

When we meet a work of art, there's something about that encounter that isn't fixed in time, but rather, it unfixes time: the shaft opens. The past and present exist in the same moment, and we know, as beings, that we are connected. All the people who lived before us, all who will come after us, are connected in this moment.