Sophia Mcdowell

“An idiolect. That’s what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He’s been too blithe, he’d forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“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

“They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“We all mine and undermine and landmine ourselves, in our own ways, in our own time, Sophia thinks.”
― Ali Smith, Winter