Quotes from Ali Smith

Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That's what art is: it's the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together.

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.

My nature is feminist. How could you not be a feminist and be alive? The world is full of brilliant, interesting women.

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.

Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.

She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.

To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.

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.

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

The lifelong friends, he said. We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.

That's what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.

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.

We have to hope, Daniel was saying, that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.

Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?

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.

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

Is it 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.

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.

There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.

We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. 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.

this is before we're living together, before we do the most faithful act of all, mix our separate books into one library)

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.

That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature.

There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in everything, everywhere we look.