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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

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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Always
Changed
Cross
High
Crosses
Natural
Rivers
Nature
Mets
Stories
Brave
Acrobats
Wells
Telling
Rope
Well
Gave
Balanced
Made
Needed
River

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Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.
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There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.
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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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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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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.
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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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All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.
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The proper word for me, Robin Goodman says, is me.
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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.
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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.
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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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There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.
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Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
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I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.
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Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
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We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery.
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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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Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.
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