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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
Never
Headstone
Carve
Tombstone
Actually
Wanted

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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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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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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Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
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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Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
Ali Smith
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I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
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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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.
Ali Smith
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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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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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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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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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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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There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.
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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I wouldn't call my work Modernist. I would rust if I try to think about labels. I'd feel like the Tin Man in 'The Wizard of Oz.
Ali Smith
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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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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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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.
Ali Smith