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 SmithWe'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 SmithEvery 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 SmithTo be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.
Ali SmithTonight 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 SmithWe'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