Top 300 Ali Smith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Ali Smith

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

— Ali Smith

3. “To be noticed is to be loved.”

— Ali Smith

4. “A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I’d much rather go and read a book.”

— Ali Smith

5. “Change is the nature of luck.”

— Ali Smith

6. “But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.”

— Ali Smith

7. “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.”

— Ali Smith

8. “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.”

— Ali Smith

9. “Art is always an exchange, like love, whose giving and taking can be a complex and wounding matter, according to Michelangelo.”

— Ali Smith

10. “I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.”

— Ali Smith

11. “Looking in the mirror suddenly she thinks that we all know our dates of birth but that 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.”

— Ali Smith

12. “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.”

— Ali Smith

13. “Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.”

— Ali Smith

14. “There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.”

— Ali Smith

15. “God almighty. It is the dregs, really, to be living in a time when even your dreams have to be post-postmodern consciouser-than-thou.”

— Ali Smith

16. “I want to be bored. But I can’t. But I really don’t want to be this thing that I’m having to be instead of being bored.”

— Ali Smith

17. “The thing is, Iphis and Ianthe had actually, for real, very really, fallen in love. Did their hearts hurt? I said. Did they think they were underwater all the time? Did they feel scoured by light? Did they wander about not knowing what to do with themselves?”

— Ali Smith

18. “Believe me. Everything is meant.”

— Ali Smith

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

— Ali Smith

Featured in: Winter Quotes

20. “You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.”

— Ali Smith

21. “I’m blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that’s almost never what our friendships are about. And every writer I’ve ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it’s important not to mix the two up.”

— Ali Smith

22. “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.”

— Ali Smith

23. “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.”

— Ali Smith

24. “Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.”

— Ali Smith

25. “Now what we don’t want is Facts. What we want is bewilderment. What we want is repetition. What we want is repetition.”

— Ali Smith

26. “When the state is not kind, then the people are fodder.”

— Ali Smith

27. “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.”

— Ali Smith

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

— Ali Smith

29. “EM Forster, though, saw it a little more evenhandedly: ’when human beings love they try to get something. They also try to give something, and this double aim makes love more complicated than food or sleep. It is selfish and altruistic at the same time, and no amount of specialization in one direction quite atrophies the other.”

— Ali Smith

30. “All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.”

— Ali Smith

31. “Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it’s too late.”

— Ali Smith

32. “Tonight I can smell the season the way it’s usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you’re used to it, when you’ve forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.”

— Ali Smith

33. “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.”

— Ali Smith

34. “I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.”

— Ali Smith

35. “Myself, I thought about you the whole time. Even when I wasn’t thinking about you, I thought about you.”

— Ali Smith

36. “I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light, like a river seen from a train makes a channel of sky etch itself deep into a landscape. I had not really known I could be so much more than myself. I had not known another body could do this to mine.”

— Ali Smith

37. “It is like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with. It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue. It is the end of dialogue.”

— Ali Smith

38. “When you’ve nothing, at least you’ve all of it.”

— Ali Smith

39. “How very disappointing truth is sometimes.”

— Ali Smith

40. “I would give anything to taste. To taste just dust. Because now that I’m nearly gone, I’m more here than I ever was. Now that I’m nothing but air, all I want is to breathe it. Now that I’m silent forever, haha, it’s all words words words with me. Now that I can’t just reach out and touch, it’s all I want, is to.”

— Ali Smith

41. “Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson’s twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.”

— Ali Smith

42. “There are things that can’t be said, because it’s hard to have to know them.”

— Ali Smith

43. “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.”

— Ali Smith

44. “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.”

— Ali Smith

45. “Things can change over time, what looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open, and what’s unthinkable and impossible at one time will easily be possible in another.”

— Ali Smith

46. “Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.”

— Ali Smith

47. “Edges are magic, too; there’s a kind of forbidden magic on the borders of things, always a ceremony of crossing over, even if we ignore it or are unaware of it.”

— Ali Smith

48. “I went outside mournful, and I hit pure air. The air was full of birdsong. I went outside expecting rain but it was sunny, it was so suddenly, so openly sunny, with so sharp a spring light coming off the river, that I went down the side of the riverbank and sat in among the daffodils.”

— Ali Smith

49. “Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all.”

— Ali Smith

50. “It’s so warm it’s almost friendly. A friendly work of art. I’ve never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. It’s never sentimental. It’s generous, but it’s sardonic too. And whenever it’s sardonic, a moment later it’s generous again.”

— Ali Smith