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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.

Ali Smith

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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Least
Two
Great
Thing
Narratives
Every
Underneath
Things
Narrative
Invisible
Surface

More quotes by Ali Smith

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Even things which seem separate and finished are infinitely connected and will infinitely connect. This connection happens as soon as you let it, as soon as you engage - as soon as you even attempt to engage.
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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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.
Ali Smith
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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.
Ali Smith
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Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
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.
Ali Smith
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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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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.
Ali Smith
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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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As for Aliki - if you were to stand in the middle of Rome and say the name Sophia Loren, or Paris and say the name Catherine Deneuve or Brigitte Bardot, or L.A. and the name Marilyn Monroe, it's like standing in Athens, or anywhere in wide-flung Greece, and saying Aliki Vougiouklaki. A huge star - and so little known elsewhere in the world.
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
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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.
Ali Smith
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I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
Ali Smith
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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.
Ali Smith
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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.
Ali Smith
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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.
Ali Smith
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Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
Ali Smith
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But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style.
Ali Smith
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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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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