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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
Thing
Narratives
Every
Underneath
Things
Narrative
Invisible
Surface
Least
Two
Great

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The proper word for me, Robin Goodman says, is me.
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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
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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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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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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.
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remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.
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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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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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Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
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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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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 don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'
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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 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.
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Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
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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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Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.
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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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Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.
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All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.
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