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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

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Outside The Leaves On

Ali Smith

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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.

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And It Was Always The Stories That Needed The Telling That Gave Us The Rope We Could Cross Any River With. They Balanced Us High Above Any Crevasse. They Made Us Be Natural Acrobats. They Made Us Brave. They Met Us Well. They Changed Us. It Was In Their Nature To.

We're Well Past The End Of The Century When Time, For The First Time, Curved, Bent, Slipped, Flash Forwarded, And Flashed Back Yet Still Kept Rolling Along. We Know It All Now, With Our Thoughts Traveling At The Speed Of A Tweet, Our 140 Characters In Search Of A Paragraph. We're Post-history. We're Post-mystery.

Remember You Must Live. Remember You Most Love. Remainder You Mist Leaf.

[property] Is A Brilliant, Chillingly Revelatory Piece Of Fiction, A Work Of Craft, Economy And Such Good Merciless Observation-one Of Those Rare, Crucial Novels Illuminating A History We Think We Know And Understand So That After We've Read It We'll Never Forget Its Truths.

I Have Thought For A Long Time That The Way My Clothes Hang On Me Is More Important Than Me Inside Them.

The Head Has Its Confines. The Head’s Got Those All Right, And The Heart. The Heart Has Its Reasons.

I Want To Be Bored. But I Can't. But I Really Don't Want To Be This Thing That I'm Having To Be Instead Of Being Bored.

Books Mean All Possibilities. They Mean Moving Out Of Yourself, Losing Yourself, Dying Of Thirst And Living To Your Full. They Mean Everything.

Oh. To Be Filled With Goodness Then Shattered By Goodness, So Beautifully Mosaically Fragmented By Such Shocking Goodness.

Short Stories Consume You Faster. They're Connected To Brevity. With The Short Story, You Are Up Against Mortality. I Know How Tough They Are As A Form, But They're Also A Total Joy.

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As For Aliki - If You Were To Stand In The Middle Of Rome And Say The Name Sophia Loren, Or Paris And Say The Name Catherine Deneuve Or Brigitte Bardot, Or L.a. And The Name Marilyn Monroe, It's Like Standing In Athens, Or Anywhere In Wide-flung Greece, And Saying Aliki Vougiouklaki. A Huge Star - And So Little Known Elsewhere In The World.

The Whole Point Is, We Can Forget. It’s Important That We Forget Some Things. Otherwise We’d Go Round The World Carrying A Hodload Of Stuff We Just Don’t Need.

Fashion Is Fickle, And I Was Published Because I Was Fashionable. Because I Was Gay.

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I Don't Want A Tombstone. You Could Carve On It 'she Never Actually Wanted A Tombstone.'

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.

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Thomas Teal, A Luminous Translator Of Jansson's Twin Talent For Surface And Depth, Simplicity And Reverberation In Language, And Someone Who Knows Exactly How To Convey Her Gift For Sensing The Meaning Embedded In The Most Mundane Act Or Turn Of Phrase.

All We Are Is Eyes Looking For The Unbroken Or The Edges Where The Broken Bits Might Fit Each Other.

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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.

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