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Summer (Seasonal, #4) QUOTES

Summer (Seasonal, #4) QUOTES

1 " I have a vision that the modern sense of being a hero is like shining a bright light on things that need to be seen. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

2 " ... across the aeons and the global distances what all the peoples of the world really have in common is so many similar ways of doing humiliating and painful things to each other. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

3 " The briefest and slipperiest of the seasons, the one that won't be held to account - because summer won't be held at all, except in bits, fragments, moments, flashes of memory of so-called or imagined perfect summers, summers that never existed.
Not even this one she's in exists. Even though it's apparently the best summer so far of the century. Not even when she's quite literally walking down a road as beautiful and archetypal as this through an actual perfect summer afternoon.
So we mourn it while we're in it.
Look at me walking down a road in summer thinking about the transience of summer.
Even while I'm right at the heart of it I just can't get to the heart of it. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

4 " A book should be an axe to break the frozen sea inside you. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

5 " I don't know that I believe in gods enough to ask of them. But if they exist and I might be so bold as to say, excuse me, if you're there can you please make that sunlit summer day longer and these dark days shorter "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

6 " Whatever age you are, he says. You still die young. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

7 " But that's summer for you. Summer's like walking down a road just like this one, heading towards both light and dark. Because summer isn't just a merry tale. Because there's no merry tale without darkness. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

8 " And summer's surely really all about an imagined end. We head for it instinctually like it must mean something. We're always looking for it, looking it, heading towards it all year, the way a horizon holds the promise of a sunset. We're always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we'll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we’ll be treated well by the world. Like there really is a kinder finale and it's not just possible but assured, there's a natural harmony that'll be spread at your feet, unrolled like a sunlit landscape just for you. As if what it was always all about, your time on earth, was the full happy stretch of all the muscles of the body on a warmed patch of grass, one long sweet stem of that grass in the mouth.
Care free.
What a thought.
Summer. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

9 " You've got to use every moment. Because in the blink of an eye it's past you, and you never get your time again.
Forgive me, Grace, Charlotte said smiling, but I think that's rubbish. I believe we meet our times with our full and ready selves at whatever ages we are when the times happen to us. That's what it's all about. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

10 " A prison is a prison, he says. Whatever you fill the time with. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

11 " Maybe coincidence never means the way you want it to. Because if it did it wouldn’t be coincidence, would it? "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

12 " There is no doubt, Daniel says. You really are you.
Yes, Hannah says. I really am me. And you really are you. But if we follow Einstein's thinking and add together you plus me plus time plus space. What does that all make?
Then she waits, like she always did, for Daniel finally to catch her up.
What? What does it all make? Daniel says.
It makes you and I more than just you or I, Hannah says. It makes us us. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

13 " The English word for summer comes from Old English sumor, from the proto-indo-european root sam, meaning both one and together "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

14 " And here was a summer day, asking to be longer. As if a summer's day wasn't long enough. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

15 " You can’t put a pin through a summer. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

16 " Funny, she says leaning against an unexpected warm place in the stone on the threshold of the church and liking the feel of it on her arm. Like, how we overload summer most out of all the seasons, I mean with our expectations of it.
Nah, he says and nips the end of his rollie with a finger and thumb till it’s out. Summers can take it. That’s why they’re called summers. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

17 " We're always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we'll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we'll be treated well by the world. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

18 " You can’t stop change, the man says. It comes of necessity. You have to go with it and make something of what it makes of you. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

19 " On the contrary, time and space are what lace us all up together, Hannah says. What makes us part of the larger picture. Universally speaking. The problem is, we tend to think we're separate. But it's a delusion. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)

20 " Change is the nature of luck. "

― Ali Smith , Summer (Seasonal, #4)