Winter Quotes

“That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“That's one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“Google, his mother says. The new new found land. Not so long ago it was only the mentally deranged, the unworldly pedants, the imperialists and the naivest of schoolchildren who believed that encyclopaediae gave you any equivalence for the actual world, or any real understanding of it. And door-to-door salesmen sold them, and they were never to be trusted. And even the authorized encyclopaediae, even them we never mistook for or accepted as any real knowledge of the world. But now the world trusts search engines without a thought. The canniest door-to-door salesmen ever invented. Never mind foot in the door. Already right at the heart of the house.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“What he longs for instead, as he sits at the food-strewn table, is winter, winter itself. He wants the essentiality of winter, not this half-season grey selfsameness. He wants real winter where woods are sheathed in snow, trees emphatic with its white, their bareness shining and enhanced because of it, the ground underfoot snow-covered as if with frozen feathers or shredded cloud but streaked with gold through the trees from low winter sun, and at the end of the barely discernible track, along the dip in the snow that indicates a muffled path between the trees, the view and the woods opening to a light that’s itself untrodden, never been blemished, wide like an expanse of snow-sea, above it more snow promised, waiting its time in the blank of the sky.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“There was this different quality to the light even only four days past the shortest day; the shift, the reversal, from increase of darkness to increase of light, revealed that a coming back of light was at the heart of midwinter equally as much as the waning of light.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“A man interested in the meaning of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“He thinks about how, whatever being alive is, with all its pasts and presents and futures, it is most itself in the moments when you surface from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness that you didn't even know you were at, and break the surface.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“Mind and matter are mysterious and, when they come together, bounteous.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we’ve got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people’s rage for its own political expediency. Which is a grand old fascist trick if ever I saw one, and a very dangerous game to play. And what’s happening in the United States is directly related, and probably financially related.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“Plenty more birds in the sea, the man said.
Plenty more plastic bottles.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“Are we at mercy of technology or is technology at mercy of us?”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“An idiolect. That’s what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He’s been too blithe, he’d forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“You can’t expect to live in the world like the world’s your private myth.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“Well, the naivety and the vitriol were always there all along, Iris says. The internet’s just made them both more visible. That’s maybe a good thing.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“It isn’t a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“What’s the answer, according to you, to life’s mysteries? she says.

The answer is a question, the man says still sitting uninvited to her table. And the question is, Into whose myth do we choose to buy?”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we’re supposed to be seeing.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“But we didn’t fit, he and I. He thought it was because he was too old. He was older, and compared to the age I was I did think he was ancient. He was in his sixties then. Well, now I know that your sixties feel the same as all the other ages, and your seventies. You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“That's what winter is: an exercise remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“Self-deprecation is almost always distasteful, his mother says.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“God almighty. It is the dregs, really, to be living in a time when even your dreams have to be post-postmodern consciouser-than-thou.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“God was dead: to begin with.
And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead.

Love was dead.

Death was dead.

A great many things were dead.

Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet.

Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead.

But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water.

Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower.

Ghosts themselves weren’t dead, not exactly. Instead, the following questions came up:

“are ghosts dead
are ghosts dead or alive
are ghosts deadly”

but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning (Christmas, too, dead), and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead):”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“She is reading whatever it is very assiduously.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“When pre-planned theatre is replacing politics, she said, and we’re propelled into shock mode, trained to wait for whatever the next shock will be, served up shock on a 24 hour newsfeed like we’re infants living from nipple to sleep to nipple to sleep”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“Beauty is the true way to change things for the better. To make things better. There should be a lot more beauty in all our lives. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. There is no such thing as fake beauty. Which is why beauty is so powerful. Beauty assuages.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“We all mine and undermine and landmine ourselves, in our own ways, in our own time, Sophia thinks.”
― Ali Smith, Winter