Top 300 Ali Smith Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “I can remember once sitting opposite my brother and feeling so much love for him that it was almost as though I was knitted to him.”

— Ali Smith

252. “Look at that. He can sew. Not something he could do while he was alive. Death. Full of surprises.”

— Ali Smith

253. “How adaptable human beings were without even realizing it, slipping blindly from state to state. One morning it was summer, the next you woke up and the whole year was over; one minute you were thirty, the next sixty, sixty next year quick as a wink, how fast it all was. How quickly and smoothly, yet how shockingly, when you thought about it, the seasons and the years gave way to each other.”

— Ali Smith

254. “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.”

— Ali Smith

255. “If people think you like them, Charlotte said, well, it can go either way. There’s a lot of powerplay in liking and being liked. Such a powerful connection, it’s a chance to make the world bigger for someone else. Or smaller. That’s always the choice we’ve got.”

— Ali Smith

256. “You came back from the dead to watch tv? I said.”

— Ali Smith

257. “And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left-say we lost everything-we’d still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognised line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we’ve forgotten we even know it.”

— Ali Smith

258. “That’s what a public library means: something communal. – Kate Atkinson.”

— Ali Smith

259. “Dishevelled genius; because genius doesn’t need to be hevelled, whatever hevelled is.”

— Ali Smith

260. “That’s why you need to go to collage, Daniel said. You’re using the wrong word, Elisabeth said. The word you’re using is for when you cut out pictures of things or coloured shapes and stick them on paper. I disagree, Daniel said. Collage is an institute of education where all the rules can be thrown up into the air, and size and space and time and foreground and background all become relative, and because of these skills everything you think you know gets made into something new and strange.”

— Ali Smith

261. “She stops to make a note on her phone: abandon and presence, she writes. It’s the first time she’s felt like herself for quite some time.”

— Ali Smith

262. “And now for our entertainment when we want humiliation we’ve got reality TV instead, Iris says. And soon instead of reality TV we’ll have the President of the United States.”

— Ali Smith

263. “Seems the self you get left with on the shore, in the end, is the self that you were when you went.”

— Ali Smith

264. “We need both luck and justice to get to live the life we’re meant for, she says.”

— Ali Smith

265. “I’d laughed when I’d seen Walter Benjamin’s name, because, much like my brother used to shout when we were kids in the back of the car and we were driving south, Ten points to the first person who can see the Forth Road Bridge, or my father when he was teaching me to drive, Ten points if you can hit that woman crossing the road, what you used to say when you’d make me come with you to those boring conferences was, Ten points to the first person who hears someone say the words Walter Benjamin.”

— Ali Smith

266. “After this painting they look flat and old-fashioned, as if they’re stale dramas and pretending to be real. This one at least admits the whole thing’s a performance. Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.”

— Ali Smith

267. “And after that, I watched our house collapse in on itself and I spent some time lying in the rubble. Then I vanished completely. I wasn’t here at all. Then you phoned.”

— Ali Smith

268. “It takes a death sometimes to make us all live a bit more, Iris says.”

— Ali Smith

269. “It’s good, to be seen past, as if you’re not the only one, as if everything isn’t happening just to you. Because you’re not. And it isn’t.”

— Ali Smith

270. “The vintage cars fume along through England; outside the car windows the passing cow parsley is tall, beaded with rain, strong, green. It is incidental. This incidentality is, Elisabeth finds herself thinking, a profound statement. The cow parsley has a language of its own, one that nobody on the programme or making the programme knows or notices is being spoken.”

— Ali Smith

271. “She unfolds the piece of paper in her hands and she reads again the story written on it.”

— Ali Smith

272. “Perhaps the day will come, George thought, when I will listen to my father. For now though, how can I? He’s my father.”

— Ali Smith

273. “On the contrary, time and space are what lace us all up together, Hannah says. What makes us part of the larger picture. Universally speaking. The problem is, we tend to think we’re separate. But it’s a delusion.”

— Ali Smith

274. “Certain white people in particular can look right through young people and also black and mixed race people like we aren’t here.”

— Ali Smith

275. “I personally shall be giving her the benefits of the doubt, Elisabeth said. Now you’re ready, Daniel said. Ready for what? Elisabeth said. Ready to bagatelle it as it is, Daniel said.”

— Ali Smith

276. “I like the idea of blue and pink together, Elisabeth said.”

— Ali Smith

277. “More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities. Bernice.”

— Ali Smith

278. “It was huge, the room, her mother told her, with nothing in it but thousands of old sherry glasses piled inside each other. Like entering what you think is going to be history and finding endless sad fragility, Zoe says. One kick. Disaster. Careful where you tread.”

— Ali Smith

279. “It’s as if that map they gave us is nothing to do with the actual experience of being here, she said.”

— Ali Smith

280. “But pure joy! He’d forgotten what it feels like, to feel. To feel even just the thought of one’s own bared self near someone else’s beauty.”

— Ali Smith

281. “You can’t put a pin through a summer.”

— Ali Smith

282. “The man creases up. It seems he was joking; his shoulders go up and down but no sound comes out of him. It’s like laughter, but also like a parody of laughter, and simultaneously a bit like he’s having an asthma attack. Maybe you’re not allowed to laugh out loud behind the counter of the main Post Office.”

— Ali Smith

283. “It was now free of obviousness.”

— Ali Smith

284. “THERE was once a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house the people who were giving the dinner party.”

— Ali Smith

285. “She is reading whatever it is very assiduously.”

— Ali Smith

286. “Lise was lying in bed. That was what she was doing. There was something she had to write down. She was waiting to remember it. Thoughts were slowly unearthing in her brain, like turf being turned up by someone she could make out only on the distant horizon, on the edge of a waiting field, a person made so small by distance and so slowed with age or weariness that he or she could hardly wield the spade.”

— Ali Smith

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

— Ali Smith

288. “It feels a little dangerous, to be so close to fairy tale.”

— Ali Smith

289. “Everything means something quite other now.”

— Ali Smith

290. “I hear them. But am I going to let it stop me reading?”

— Ali Smith

291. “Yes, but everywhere needs some defence against people just coming in and overrunning the place with their terrorisms or their deficiencies, eh, sweetheart, Richard says. That’s right, Terence says. Got to keep all those bad refugees out. The ones looking for a better life. Couldn.”

— Ali Smith

292. “Books. Knowledge. Years of reading. All of which means? I know stuff.”

— Ali Smith

293. “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.”

— Ali Smith

294. “It’s quite like the songwriter actually couldn’t be bothered to think of words... It will be precisely why the song sold so many copies and was such a big deal at the time. People like things not to be too meaningful.”

— Ali Smith

295. “All of this information flashes through George’s head in that fraction of a second it takes to do the single swivel round towards H in her mother’s chair and say the words: It’s my mother’s study. Cool, H says.”

— Ali Smith

296. “It’s on my head, Elisabeth says. That’s where it grows. And my face is also attached to my head.”

— Ali Smith

297. “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.”

— Ali Smith

298. “I don’t care what language the time passes in, the girl says. So long as it passes.”

— Ali Smith

299. “Lise was lying in bed. She was falling. There.”

— Ali Smith

300. “The nights are sooner, chillier, the light a little less each time.”

— Ali Smith