Quotes from Ali Smith

I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to any more. I'm tired of being made to feel this fearful. I

It isn't that kind of relationship," Elisabeth says to a lover. "It isn't even the least physical. It never has been. But it's love. I can't pretend it isn't.

There is no doubt, Daniel says. You really are you. Yes, Hannah says. I really am me. And you really are you. But if we follow Einstein's thinking and add together you plus me plus time plus space. What does that all make? Then she waits, like she always did, for Daniel finally to catch her up. What? What does it all make? Daniel says. It makes you and I more than just you or I, Hannah says. It makes us us.

Life? was what you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you. Painting? was what you did, alone, and you sat there, and it was your own terrible fight or your own lovely bit, but it was really terribly alone. To take the moment before something had actually happened, and you didn't know if it was going to be terrible or if it might be very funny, something extraordinary actually happening and yet everybody around it not taking any notice.

Somehow this wasn't the same as melancholy. It was something else, about how melancholy and nostalgia weren't relevant in the slightest. Things just happened. Then they were over. Time just passed. Partly it felt unpleasant, to think like that, rude even. Partly it felt good. It was kind of a relief.

But I prefer the windy days, the days that strip me back, blasted, tossed, who knows where, imagine them, purple-red, silver-pink, natural confetti, thin, fragile, easily crushed and blackened, fading already wherever the air's taken them across the city, the car parks, the streets, the ragged grass verges, dog-ear and adrift on the surfaces of the puddles, flat to the gutter stones, mixing with the litter, their shards of colour circling in the leafy-grimy corners of yards.

The slightness of it gestures against the odds. It is like a magic spell.

Did I? Daniel said. While we're here. Well. While we're here, let's just always hold out hope for the person who says it. Says what, Mr Gluck? Elisabeth said. Sure you want war? Daniel said.

Imagine if people decided at birth never ever to throw away any of the shoes they wore over the whole course of a life, and had a special cupboard where they kept all these old shoes they'd walked about the world in. What would there be in such a shoe museum, when you opened its doors? Row upon row, perfectly preserved, the exact shapes we took at certain points in our lives? Or row upon row, rack upon rack, of nothing but old soiled leather, old stale smell?

Mark, shaken, realizes he has just made the terrible mistake of not just seeming to be but actually being sincere.

She thinks about the students she taught who graduate this week to all that debt, and now to a future in the past.

We have to hope 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. It is the only responsibility memory has. But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quote regardless.

The words had acted like a charm. They'd released it all, in seconds. They'd made everything happening stand just far enough away. &emsp It was nothing less than magic. &emsp Who needs a passport? &emsp Who am I? Where am I? What am I? &emsp I'm reading.

But we didn't fit, he and I. He thought it was because he was too old. He was older, and compared to the age I was I did think he was ancient. He was in his sixties then. Well, now I know that your sixties feel the same as all the other ages, and your seventies. You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.

Oamenii treceau pe trotuarul de deasupra. M? priveau ca ?i cum a? fi fost nebun?. Un pesc?ru? patrula pe autostrad?. M? privea ca ?i cum a? fi fost nebun?.

I only joke about really serious things

She came right up to the side of the building as if she were coming round its corner and simply sort of reading the sign because that's what she was, a girl reading the world.

Believe me. Everything is meant.

Crying came out of her like weather

What I do when it distresses me that there's something I can't remember, is. Are you listening? Yes, Elisabeth said through the crying. I imagine that whatever it is I've forgotten is folded close to me, like a sleeping bird. What kind of bird? Elisabeth said. A wild bird, Daniel said. Any kind. You'll know what kind when it happens. Then, what I do is, I just hold it there, without holding it too tight, and I let it sleep. And that's that.

They're called rollerblades, she said. Rollerblades, Daniel said. Right. Well? And you can't rollerblade on grass, she said. Can't you? Daniel said. How very disappointing truth is sometimes. Can't we try? There'd be no point, she said. Can't we try anyway? he said. We might disprove the general consensus. Okay, Elisabeth said.

Got a light? See? Careful. I'm everything you ever dreamed.

When pre-planned theatre is replacing politics, she said, and we're propelled into shock mode, trained to wait for whatever the next shock will be, served up shock on a 24 hour newsfeed like we're infants living from nipple to sleep to nipple to sleep

Deeply exciting, though, cliché was, as a concept. It was truth misted by overexpression, wasn't it, like a structure seen in a fog, something waiting to be re-felt, re-seen. Something dainty fumbled at through thick gloves. Cliché was true, obviously, which was why it had become cliché in the first place; so true that cliché actually protected you from its own truth by being what it was, nothing but cliché.