The Whole Story and Other Stories Quotes

“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.”
― Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories

“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.”
― Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories

“I fall in love. More figuratively speaking, I am walking along the road one day when out of nowhere I am struck by lightning.”
― Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories

“[...] its small squares of fast-passing light, the early evening windows of the lives of hundreds of others.”
― Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories

“... because I can read you like a book and because the thing about a beloved book, if it's a good one, is that it shifts like music; you think you know it, you've read it so many times, of course you know it, of course the pleasure of it is in how well you know it, but then you hear, in the background, the thing you never heard in it before, and with the turn of a page you see a combination of words you know you've never seen before, you thought you knew this book but it dazzles you with the different book it is, yet again, and not just that but the different person you have become, the different person you are now, reading it again, and you, my love, are an excellent book for me, and then us both together, which takes some talent with rhythm, but luckily we are quite talented at reading each other.”
― Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories

“I lie on the floor with my head on my books and my feet up on more of my books and stare up at the ceiling with its flystuck old electric fitting and at this point in the story even the ceiling is glorious.”
― Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories