Jane Alison > Quotes

“When you're sixteen or seventeen meaning can be anywhere. A drop of rain running down the window is a symbol, a song comes on the radio just when you longed for it, you have the same initials as the boy for whom you're sick, secret messages await you in poems. It's like living in a net of logic, of systems of words and significance.”
― Jane Alison, The Sisters Antipodes

“So often fictions that experiment formally do so at the expense of feeling. They toy on surfaces or are purely cerebral affairs, don’t explore human complexities. But the mostly unconventional narratives I’ve been discussing have dealt powerfully with core human matters. … And they have found patterns other than the wave to do this, or worked in a doubled, moiré relation with the wave, one pattern upon another. I believe they’ve done this organically: a meander or net or explosion was simply the pattern the material needed.”
― Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

“Making a self can be like writing, and now I think writing can be like home: a space you make that you dwell in and roam through for hours every day, a space that's absolutely yours.”
― Jane Alison, The Sisters Antipodes

“This stream of watching made what was watched wanted.”
― Jane Alison, The Sisters Antipodes

“Sometimes you make a bad choice in these matters, of men and horns and fins. Sometimes it seems no choice is good. And really, I lie when I ask who made men the trees, the stars. Almighty fathers and stepfathers: that’s who.”
― Jane Alison, Nine Island

“Just as there can be a hole in these narratives, a memoir can be as much about what's forgotten as what's remembered.”
― Jane Alison, The Sisters Antipodes

“Even arcing fictions can be designed, with texture, color, symmetry, or repetitions graphable as wavelike stripes”
― Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative