Emma Smith > Quotes

“Life is like the river, sometimes it sweeps you gently along and sometimes the rapids come out of nowhere.”
― Emma Smith

“Strength is not something you have, it's something you find.”
― Emma Smith

“Even if I were trying to catch a husband I would never fish in shallow waters.”
― Emma Smith

“Beer, that cold amber drink so good for friendship,”
― Emma Smith, Maidens' Trip

“It’s funny how having lots of books—more than you could read in the rest of your life—makes a person seem like an intellectual, whereas having more shoes than you can wear or cars than you can drive makes you seem needy or overcompensating.”
― Emma Smith, Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers

“We all know Shakespeare occupies a paradoxical place in contemporary culture. On the one hand his work is revered: quoted, performed, graded, subsidized, parodied. Shakespeare! On the other hand – cue yawns and eye rolls, or fear of personal intellectual failure – Shakespeare can be an obligation, a set text, inducing a terrible and particular weariness that can strike us sitting in the theatre at around 9.30 p.m., when we are becalmed in Act 4 and there’s still an hour to go (admit it – we’ve all been there). Shakespeare is a cultural gatekeeper, politely honoured rather than robustly challenged. Does anyone actually like reading this stuff?”
― Emma Smith

“As this book has explored, we have always had different, complex motives for our relationships with our books. Jorge Luis Borges described a book as ‘a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships’: Portable Magic has argued for two particular kinds of relationship in our long love affair with books. One is the interconnectedness of book form and book content. And the other is the reciprocity and proximity of books and their readers, in relationships that leave both parties changed. This copy of Portable Magic now carries traces of your DNA in its gutter, your fingerprints on its cover. If you own it, you can bend its page corners or write your name in it or make satirical comments in the margin. You can lend it, or return it to the library, or give it away, or send it to the charity shop, but it will always be somehow yours.”
― Emma Smith, Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers

“This is a relationship in which each partner has the capacity to abuse the other: books can crack our spines, loosen our leaves, mark us with their dirty fingers and write in our margins just as much as we can theirs.”
― Emma Smith, Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers

“It's commonplace to describe theater—the activity underpinning the very existence of this book—as a collaborative artform in which the author's words are shaped, embodied and adapted by actors, directors, producers, designers, musicians and above all, audiences.”
― Emma Smith