ASAli Smith

38 collected words

Ali Smith

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

And they all lived happily ever after, until they died.

Ali Smith / quote

02Undated

She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.

Ali Smith / quote

03Undated

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineerings of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.

Ali Smith / quote

04Undated

Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?

Ali Smith / quote

05Undated

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

Ali Smith / quote

06Undated

It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, even though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it's there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself you'd have to add the equivalent describing word and that's how you'd know. The black girl ran across the park.

Ali Smith / quote

07Undated

It is perhaps rather fine, after all, being dead. Highly underrated in the modern western world.

Ali Smith / quote

08Undated

He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. But he really looked like a girl. She was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen in my life.

Ali Smith / quote

09Undated

Maybe it's easier to talk to someone who won't ever actually hear what you say.

Ali Smith / quote

10Undated

Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.

Ali Smith / quote

11Undated

And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.

Ali Smith / quote

12Undated

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

Ali Smith / quote

13Undated

Above the keyhole the door has a latch. It is pretending to be an authentic old latch. The door is pretending to be an authentic old door. Maybe everything there is isn't authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending.

Ali Smith / quote

14Undated

A game one of my sisters will play with me in my first year of being alive is called Good Baby, Bad Baby. This consists of being told I am a good baby until I smile and laugh, then being told I am a bad baby until I burst into tears. This training will stand me in good stead all through my life.

Ali Smith / quote