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Winter (Seasonal, #2) QUOTES

Winter (Seasonal, #2) QUOTES

1 " 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 (Seasonal, #2)

2 " Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it? "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)

3 " A man interested in the meaning of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless. "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)

4 " None of these things is happening here. They are all happening far away, elsewhere.

But they may as well be, Iris says. What does here mean anyway, I’d like to know. Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it? "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)

5 " ..it’s like the people in the play are living in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other’s worlds. But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what’s happening right next to their ears and eyes, they’d see it’s the same play they’re all in, the same world, that they’re all part of the same story. "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)

6 " Never mind literal climate change, there’s been a whole seasonal shift. It’s like walking in a blizzard all the time just trying to get to what’s really happening beyond the noise and hype. "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)

7 " … he always went straight to the machines and in a strange way it was released to because having to talk with someone, even the smallest, most casual talks, was sometimes quite hard because you always felt they judged you or you always felt shy or that you were saying a stupid or wrong thing.

The pitfalls of human exchange, Sophia said. "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)

8 " 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 (Seasonal, #2)

9 " It would be good to be full of holes, she says. Then all the things you can’t express would maybe just flow out. "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)

10 " The world order was changing and what was truly new, here and there… was that the people in power were self-servers who’d no idea about and felt no responsibility towards history. "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)

11 " 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 (Seasonal, #2)

12 " The world is full of people looking for meaning in the shape of a bird not native to this country turning up in this country after all. "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)

13 " That's one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once. "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)

14 " You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside. "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)

15 " 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 (Seasonal, #2)

16 " 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 (Seasonal, #2)

17 " 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 (Seasonal, #2)

18 " 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 (Seasonal, #2)

19 " Mind and matter are mysterious and, when they come together, bounteous. "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)

20 " Plenty more birds in the sea, the man said.
Plenty more plastic bottles. "

― Ali Smith , Winter (Seasonal, #2)