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I don't want a tombstone. You could carve on it 'She never actually wanted a tombstone.'

Ali Smith

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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Actually
Wanted
Never
Headstone
Carve
Tombstone

More quotes by Ali Smith

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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.
Ali Smith
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Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.
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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.
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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The whole point is, we can forget. It’s important that we forget some things. Otherwise we’d go round the world carrying a hodload of stuff we just don’t need.
Ali Smith
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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.
Ali Smith
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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.
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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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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Stella Duffy is a writer who never lets you down.
Ali Smith
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I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
Ali Smith
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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.
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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My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.
Ali Smith
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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
Ali Smith
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Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
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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It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.
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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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