Quotes from Ali Smith

He turns to go—and that's when he gets kicked in the head by the half of the pantomime horse it's slipped his mind to shoot. He falls to the ground, dead himself on top of the pantomime fallen. It's a surrealist vision of hell. What's surrealist, Mr. Gluck? This is.

there's nothing left of them, the pantomime innocents or the man with the gun, but bones in grass, bones in flowers, the leafy branches of the ash tree above them. Which s what, in the end, is left of us all, whether we carry a gun while we're here or don't. So. While we're here. I mean, while we're still here.

Elisabeth is faintly perturbed. She realizes this is because she likes to imagine her mother knows nothing much about anything.

The nettles say nothing. The seeds at the tops of the grass stems say nothing. The little white flowers on the tops of their stalks, she doesn't know what they are but they're saying their fresh nothing. The buttercups say it merrily. The gorse says it unexpectedly, a bright yellow nothing, smooth and soft and delicate against the mute green nothing of its barbs.

Why should we imagine that gender matters here? the tutor said. That's actually my question too, Elisabeth said.

Whole worlds open up when we start a conversation.

Everything, sooner or later, transforms into story.

This is part empathy, part thievery. Empathy, in art, is art's part-exchange with us, its inclusivity, at once a kindness, a going beyond the self, and a pickpocketing of our responses, which is why giving and taking are bound up with the goods, with the gods, with respect, with deep-seated understanding about the complex cultural place where kindness, thievery, bartering, and gift-giving all meet, make their exchanges, and by exchange reveal real worth.

You're going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history. Otherwise there'll be no good hope for your own grand truths and no good truths for your own grandchildren.

And on that night, when all he's ever known in the past couple of years started to break apart, he did not try so desperately to keep her muse. He didn't need to. He also did not soak up in bottles of rum. Instead, he went home. He went home and painted. Because before any of this has ever happened, he was a painter.

How did Dostoevsky know, she interrupted me, about that extraordinary vindictiveness, that relish for bitter laughter that comes over women in pain?

One blink of a camera eye (can't quite put his finger on the name of the photographer) and that child dressed in leaves became all these things: sad, terrible, beautiful, funny, terrifying, dark, light, charming, fairystory, folkstory, truth.

It was what we did," Helen [Clyne, Kate Atkinson's daughter] said. "It was a habit, a ritual. You borrowed it, you read it, you brought it back and chose something else, and someone else read whatever you read before and after you. It was communal. That's what public library means: something communal.

A whole time can reduce down to a single taste, a moment. A whole person down to the skelf of a self

There was once a child whose mother fell asleep. The end. Is that it? I said What else do you need to know? you said. Can't you tell me a little more about them? I said. (I was beginning to despair of your storytelling technique.)

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.

It was all : it was nothing : it was more than enough. Fine.

I cannot tell a lie. It was me who chopped down the cherry tree. Now that I've been so honest, make me a precedent. No, not president. I said precedent.

I'm composed when it comes to compost.

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

That's what a public library means: something communal. - Kate Atkinson

Okay, I said. As long as I've got you here, we're going to use and appreciate this present moment. Because I wish, and I've wished a thousand times since you went, that we'd known it was the present, and that we were living in it.

Even in the timeless zone of the average day of an unwell person invisible to the rest of the fast-moving world there was Deirdre at four o'clock.

What are we doing in the world that we are denying people the right to an open education? And we are denying it by making education something you have to pay for so drastically. How are people supposed to afford this?