Ali Smith Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.

Ali Smith
The head has its confines. The head's got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.

Ali Smith
I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored.

Ali Smith
We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.

Ali Smith
Even things which seem separate and finished are infinitely connected and will infinitely connect. This connection happens as soon as you let it, as soon as you engage - as soon as you even attempt to engage.

Ali Smith
All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.

Ali Smith
Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.

Ali Smith
It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.

Ali Smith
We are living in a time when lies are sanctioned. We have always lived in that time, but now the lies are publicly, rhetorically sanctioned.

Ali Smith
Truth isn't relative. But there's going to be a great sacrifice on the way to getting truth to matter to us again, to finding out why it does, and God knows what shape that sacrifice will take.

Ali Smith
Fiction tells you, by the making up of truth, what is really true.

Ali Smith
The whole point is, we can forget. It's important that we forget some things. Otherwise we'd go round the world carrying a hodload of stuff we just don't need.

Ali Smith
Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.

Ali Smith
Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn't there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.

Ali Smith
Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly; they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four. The clouds were high and the swallows would be here for another month or so before they left for the south before they returned again next summer.

Ali Smith
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
We all know our dates of birth but... 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.

Ali Smith
Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.

Ali Smith
Remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.

Ali Smith
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
I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.

Ali Smith