Quote

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

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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Also
Faster
Connected
Tough
Short
Brevity
Joy
Consume
Story
Insightful
Form
Mortality
Stories
Total

More quotes by Ali Smith

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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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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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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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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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remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.
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A game one of my sisters will play with me in my first year of being alive is called Good Baby, Bad Baby. This consists of being told I am a good baby until I smile and laugh, then being told I am a bad baby until I burst into tears. This training will stand me in good stead all through my life.
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The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.
Ali Smith
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It's about the connecting force from form to form. It's the toe bone connecting to the shoulder bone. It's the bacterial kick of life force, something growing out of nothing, forming itself out of something else. Form never stops. And form is always environmental.
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Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four. The clouds were high and the swallows would be here for another month or so before they left for the south before they returned again next summer.
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Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
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All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.
Ali Smith
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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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I was at the tail end of the family. The next brother along was already seven years older than me. I remember growing up by myself, playing games by myself.
Ali Smith
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I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
Ali Smith
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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.
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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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It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.
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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.
Ali Smith
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Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.
Ali Smith
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Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
Ali Smith