"Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late."
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Quote collection
Ali Smith quotes (page 1 of 3)
48 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible."
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"Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay."
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"Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything."
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"I wouldn't call my work Modernist. I would rust if I try to think about labels. I'd feel like the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz."
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"Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down."
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"Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness."
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"To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better."
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"A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book."
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"Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy."
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"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."
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"Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?"
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"What shop did this book come from? she asked. Her father was looking worried at the cooker. He always got rice wrong. I don't know, Brooksie, he said, I don't remember. That was unimaginable, not remembering where a book has come from! and where it was bought from! That was part of the whole history, the whole point, of any book that you owned! And when you picked it up later in the house at home, you knew, you just knew by looking and having it in your hand, where it came from and where you got it and when and why you'd decided to buy it."
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"I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in."
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"I had a job, I got ill, I left the job to get better, and while I was getting better, I wrote some stories. I sent them to some publishers and the fifth one who replied said they'd take them. Then they went bankrupt. Then that bankrupt publisher got bought by a bigger firm. Story: in the end is the beginning, and in the beginning is the end."
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"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."
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"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"
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"You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, "I'm a writer," it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away."
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"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."
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"[Property] is a brilliant, chillingly revelatory piece of fiction, a work of craft, economy and such good merciless observation-one of those rare, crucial novels illuminating a history we think we know and understand so that after we've read it we'll never forget its truths."
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