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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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Ali Smith
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Playwright
Writer
Well
North
Always
Somewhere
Seen
Father
Mother
Newark
Else
Scotland
Wells
Ireland
Come
Ended

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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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The proper word for me, Robin Goodman says, is me.
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Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?
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There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
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Words are like untying a corset - you can move into this great space with them.
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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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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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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.
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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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Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
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Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.
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