Quotation Study: Gliff, Ali Smith
On staying open and alert...
This is not necessarily a review—I just love analysing and unpacking quotes, sometimes even individual words within them. However, as a general rule, if I underline lots of quotes, it’s usually a highly rated book!
These are studies of quotes within certain novels—either unpacking larger themes or simply exploring how each quote makes me feel on its own. I like applying quotes to my life, using them to articulate feelings I’ve never known how to describe. So, welcome to Quotation Studies.
There’s no rhyme or reason here. Just thoughts sprawled out onto a page. It’s me enjoying language as a former literature student who misses the act of unpacking words.
This Week: Gliff, Ali Smith
I never quite know what’s going on in an Ali Smith novel and I think that’s part of the point. The first one I picked up was The Accidental, in the first few weeks of my undergrad degree, and I remember feeling vaguely alarmed, like I’d walked into a conversation that had already been going on for hours. I wasn’t sure what I’d signed up for. That was nine books ago. I’m still often confused, plot-wise, but by now I know better than to expect a tidy narrative arc. What I come for — and what I always find — are the lines that knock the wind out of you. The quiet, urgent thoughts on language, politics, technology, memory. The deep alertness to the world as it is, and the world as it might become.
Gliff is Smith’s most recent novel, the first of two in a series. Elliptical and fast-moving, somewhere between a novel, a fable, and a philosophical warning. It’s defined as a dystopia but it’s already too real to be that. It’s concerned with AI, climate change, surveillance, and the way language shifts under pressure. Trying to understand the unknowable.
The quotes I pulled aren’t thematically neat, but they all hum with a kind of scepticism. A resistance to being told too quickly what things mean. A fear, or maybe just an awareness, of how fragile our knowledge really is, and how easily it can be manipulated.
“Thrilling both to know and to not know, to be gifted possibilities.”
Smith is always troubling the line between knowing and not knowing — turning it over like a coin. She’s less interested in certainty than in movement, in what it means to stay curious in a world that rewards fixed opinions. There’s an epistemological playfulness in her work, but also a deep seriousness: the idea that what we don’t know might be just as important — just as worthy — as what we do.
“You’ve no idea the doors that open when a word in one language crosses into another language.”
This is not just about what language communicates, but what it withholds. The slipperiness of it. The joy. The violence. To speak multiple languages is to see the cracks between them, to understand that nothing is ever a perfect translation. But the space in between meanings is also where possibility lives. To cross languages is to remake the world a little, to shake loose the boundaries of thought. The thrill here isn’t just about knowledge. It’s about expansion. Of bettering yourself.
“Why are they trying to render us so temporary?”
This felt like a quiet thesis, tucked into the middle of a conversation. There’s a weariness in the question — the sense that we are being sped up, flattened, turned into data points. It reminded me that permanence, in Smith’s work, isn’t about legacy or grand gestures. It’s about presence. About slowing down enough to feel the weight of your own life.
“Our mother thought smartphones were liabilities. So, what you want, she’d say whenever we begged her for a smartphone or a smart anything, is to have a device that means you see everything.”
Is it really better to see everything? Is it worse not to? The novel doesn’t answer these questions, but it lingers in them. There’s a temptation to romanticise disconnection — the flip phone, the off grid life. But Smith seems to suggest that attention is a form of power. To learn, to witness, even if it’s uncomfortable or overwhelming, is still to be in the world. There’s a kind of ethical commitment in that.
“Even so, even the thousands of fragments of images AI would use to make a non-existent child had to have come from children who’d been complete children once.”
This might have been the line that stayed with me longest. A reminder that nothing is made from nothing. That even the most sophisticated technologies are stitched together from fragments of real lives — children, faces, voices, data that once belonged to someone. Smith’s warning isn’t anti-technology, exactly. But it is deeply human. She’s asking us to notice where things come from. To see the cost of progress, not just the spectacle of it.
There’s a deep unease in Gliff, but it’s paired with wonder. Smith gives us a world full of danger, yes, but also one still trembling with potential. She doesn’t pretend to know everything — and she doesn’t ask us to, either. What she gives us, instead, is permission to stay open. To sit in uncertainty. To trust that not knowing can be, sometimes, its own kind of knowledge.