32
" Look, I'm just trying to put what I'm feeling into words, a feeling that's not easy to describe, into -
Don't story yourself to me, you waste of-
time in his life when he was able to love, literally be in love with, be at actual soul level happily infatuated with something like the simplicity of a lemon. Just any lemon, in a bowl, or on a market stall, or in a net with other lemons waiting to be bought at a supermarket. There was a time in his life when such a thing had filled him with joy. "
― Ali Smith , Spring (Seasonal, #3)
38
" April. It teaches us everything. The coldest and nastiest days of the year can happen in April. It won’t matter. It’s April. The English word for the month comes from the Roman Aprilis, the Latin aperire: to open, to uncover, to make accessible, or to remove whatever stops something from being accessible. It maybe also partly comes from the name of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, whose happy fickleness with various gods mirrors the month’s own showery-sunny fickleness. Month of sacrifice and month of playfulness. Month of restoration, of fertility-festivity. Month when the earth and the buds are already open, the creatures asleep for the winter have woken and are already breeding, the birds have already built their nests, birds that this time last year didn’t exist, busy bringing to life the birds that’ll replace them this time next year. Spring-cuckoo month, grass-month. In Gaelic its name means the month that fools mistake for May. April Fool’s Day also probably marks what was the old end of the new year celebrations. Winter has Epiphany. Spring’s gifts are different. Month of dead deities coming back to life. In the French revolutionary calendar, along with the last days of March, it becomes Germinal, the month of return to the source, to the seed, to the germ of things, which is maybe why Zola gave the novel he wrote about hopeless hope this revolutionary title. April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective. "
― Ali Smith , Spring (Seasonal, #3)
40
" No, see, I'm not going to tell you what I voted. I'm not going to let you think you can decide something about me either way. All I’ll say is, I was younger then, and I still thought politics mattered. But all this. This endless. It's eating the, the, you know. Soul. Doesn't matter what I voted or you voted or anyone voted. Because what's the point, if nobody in the end is going to listen to or care about what other people think unless they think and believe the same thing as them. And you people. Asking us what we think all the time like it matters. You don't care what we think. You just want a fight. You just want us to air. Tell what it's doing. It's making us all meaningless. You're your no. making us meaningless, and the people in power, doing it all for us, for democracy, yeah, right, pull the other one. They're doing it for their pay-off. They make us more meaningless every day. "
― Ali Smith , Spring (Seasonal, #3)