Moira Macfarlane

“What’s the answer, according to you, to life’s mysteries? she says.

The answer is a question, the man says still sitting uninvited to her table. And the question is, Into whose myth do we choose to buy?”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“Och, ik denk dat wie de zee begrijpt nooit een psychiater nodig heeft. Die eindeloze golven en die verre horizon. De zee is de enige zichtbare eeuwigheid op aarde. Daar ademde ik diep in. De zeelucht, duizenden kilometers lang gewassen met met blauw, vrijheid en zeilen, kwam mijn longen binnen.”
― Rodaan Al Galidi, Hoe ik talent voor het leven kreeg

“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

“It isn’t a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. 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