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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.

Ali Smith

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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Book
Much
Good
Always
Dialogue
Life
Proof
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Argument
Rather
Read

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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remember you must live. remember you most love. remainder you mist leaf.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
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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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Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
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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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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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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.
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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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I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
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Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.
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
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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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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