Quotes from Ali Smith

Cut this tree I'm living in down. Hollow its trunk out. Make me all over again, with what you scooped out of its insides. Slide the new me back inside the old trunk. Burn me. Burn the tree. Spread the ashes, for luck, where you want next year's crops to grow. Birth me all over again Burn me and the tree Next summer's sun Midwinter guarantee

It's all right to forget, you know, he said. It's good to. In fact, we have to forget things sometimes. Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we'd never sleep ever again.

I'm good at the real and the true and the beautiful and can do With some skill and With or without flattery the Place where all 3 meet ...

Eras end, Paulina said. I'm Romanian. I know. They have to. So that new eras can begin.

It is possible, he said, to be in love not with someone but with their eyes. I mean, with how eyes that aren't yours let you see where you are, who you are.

Getting old is pathetic if you use it as an excuse for no longer being responsible.

it was a thing that has to fall to rise …

After this painting they look flat and old-fashioned, as if they're stale dramas and pretending to be real. This one at least admits the whole thing's a performance. Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.

Working title? Paddy says. <...> Same as the novel, he says. To persuade people it's an adaptation of something a lot of people bought so it must be good.

can't bear it, he said. It is like your mother has become a dwarf and as if her dwarf self is always twinkling away in all the corners of the house and the yard, always in the corner of my eye. I shrugged.

Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about. Then the seedheads rattle, the seeds fall out. Then there's even more language waiting to come up.

The longer Sacha lives the more insane she realizes the species she belongs to is.

It's on my head, Elisabeth says. That's where it grows. And my face is also attached to my head.

Perhaps somewhere in all of this if you look there's a proof of love.

The fact is, imagine.

Like entering what you think is going to be history and finding endless sad fragility.

It's as if that map they gave us is nothing to do with the actual experience of being here, she said.

Elisabeth had been listening to the programme in the bath. She'd switched the radio off after it and wondered if she'd be able to listen to Radio 4 in any innocence ever again. Her ears had undergone a sea-change. Or the world had. But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and — Rich and what? she thought. Rich and poor.

A child grows up saying words that the rest of the world tells the child aren't words. But the child and everybody the child holds dear all know that the words mean, and what the words mean. Listen, that child will be equipped, from the very beginning. For everything, dark and light, heavy and light, that life will bring to that child.

Perhaps the day will come, George thought, when I will listen to my father. For now though, how can I? He's my father.

But imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you'd made, as if the thing you'd made became you.

But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened.

We need both luck and justice to get to live the life we're meant for, she says.

Anyway, it was her job to subvert political things with art things, and to subvert art things with political things. Like