7 Quotes & Sayings By Anna Smaill

Anna Smaill was born in Scotland and grew up in London. She studied English at Sussex University, graduating with a first class honours degree in Creative Writing. Since then, she has written four novels, including Precious Bane, which won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2011. Her debut novel, The Lighthouse, was co-winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book in 2013 Read more

Her next novel, The One Memory of Flora Banks, will be published in 2014. Anna lives in London with her husband and two children.

1
When the music comes, you try to see it shining between your eyes. Like threads stretched taut and the notes as colored beads threaded on. When you get very good, it's as if you can see inside the music, through it. You bring the music alive, bring it into being. As if you're the one composing. Anna Smaill
2
When you don't grasp something or remember something, I think your mind at last says, "Okay, " and part of it accepts this. In the end your mind gets to welcome that deadening. that's what I believe anyway. Half of our memoryloss is by choice. Anna Smaill
3
This is the story I am working on. But it isn't complete as I don't have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes over time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they're put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn't one. I see that if I am lucky and do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meaning. Because there is not yet any end. Anna Smaill
4
But some memories are more important than others, ' she says. 'Because some memories belong to more than just one other person... Some memories tell us about who we are. They need to be kept safe so that things can change for all of us Anna Smaill
5
That difference, that indefinable difference between talent and genius. It is as fine as hair, invisible to the eye and even, most of the time, to the ear. But in her face when she looks at her brother, I see that it may as well be a huge uncrossable chasm. Anna Smaill
6
What is it, the difference between ordinary people and those with genius? Not just ordinary people either. Intelligent people, sensitive ones, exceptionally talented ones. Even people like Sonja who give everything and then more, who work harder than seems possible on the thing they love. Anna Smaill