Brave old world.

— Ali Smith

But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened.

— Ali Smith

But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll probably find out – and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out – what happened. And if we don't, we feel cheated.

— Ali Smith

But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.

— Ali Smith

Cause nobody's the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves - except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends. Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of color, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.

— Ali Smith

Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.

— Ali Smith

Got a light? See? Careful. I'm everything you ever dreamed.

— Ali Smith

He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. But he really looked like a girl. She was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen in my life.

— Ali Smith

Is there any escaping the junk shop of the self?

— Ali Smith

Is there never any escaping the junk shop of the self?

— Ali Smith