Metafiction Quotes

“Every story worth a damn is about getting inside someone else’s skin and living there. Not observing. Not empathizing. Living there. The rest is furniture.”
― J.K. Franko, What You Let In

“A story is not only what it says. A story is what it does. It infects. Then it propagates.”
― J.K. Franko, What You Let In

“Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.”
― Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“Attention is the rarest currency, and you spent a great deal of yours here. On me.”
― J.K. Franko, What You Let In

“I looked back down at the cursive. Not because it made sense, but because it felt aimed. Not at me. Past me. Toward whoever would come next.”
― J.K. Franko, What You Let In

“I had the strange thought that from now on Samuel would just be a character in someone else’s story. Not a writer anymore. Just material. I suppose that happens to all of us eventually. Someone else picks up the pen.”
― J.K. Franko, What You Let In

“Nicholas said coffins resemble doorways. Books do too.”
― J.K. Franko, What You Let In

“How is your father?” she asks disinterestedly.
“A contrivance,” I mutter. “A plot device.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama

“If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“The arrow of time obscures memory of both past and future circumstance with innumerable fallacies, the least trivial of which is perception.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?'
A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.'
You enjoy this duty?'
He nodded.
I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.”
― Roger Zelazny, The Hand of Oberon

“Why do I covet metafiction so much? Why do I nurture a style that David Foster Wallace purportedly exploded in the late 1980s, that is derided by most literary theorists as passé, that people tend to agree serves no worldly, moral purpose other than to draw attention to the writer’s own navel? Because, dammit, metafiction is relevant to today.”
― M.J. Nicholls

“Y'know — Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about 'em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts . . . and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney,— same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.
So I'm going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now'll know a few simple facts about us — more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lind-bergh flight.
See what I mean?
So — people a thousand years from now — this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. — This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

Said by the Stage Manager”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“Sometimes there was no third book. No resolution no matter how many times you reread or how hard you wished for it.”
― Ilona Andrews, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

“One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory.”
― Jorges Luis Borges

“Two whores who finally found something to mother. A guy could write a book about it, he thought bitterly, call it From Hair To Maternity. It would probly be a very long book. Whores did not produce as fast as rabbits.”
― James Jones, From Here to Eternity

“We are all footnotes, many of us will never have the chance to be read, all of us in an unrelenting and desperate struggle for our lives, for the life of a footnote, to remain on the surface before, in spite of our efforts, we are submerged. Everywhere we leave constant traces of our existence, of our struggle against vacuity. And the greater the vacuity, the more violent our struggle.”
― Dubravka Ugrešić, Lisica

“The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another.

'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“Princess Cookie’s cognitive pathways may have required a more comprehensive analysis. He knew that it was possible to employ certain progressive methods of neural interface, but he felt somewhat apprehensive about implementing them, for fear of the risks involved and of the limited returns such tactics might yield. For instance, it would be a particularly wasteful endeavor if, for the sake of exhausting every last option available, he were even to go so far as resorting to invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery, for this unorthodox process would only prove to be the cerebral equivalent of tracking a creature one was not even sure existed: surely one could happen upon some new species deep in the caverns somewhere and assume it to be the goal of one’s trek, but then there was a certain idiocy to this notion, as one would never be sure this newfound entity should prove to be what one wished it to be; taken further, this very need to find something, to begin with, would only lead one to clamber more deeply inward along rigorous paths and over unsteady terrain, the entirety of which could only be traversed with the arrogant resolve of someone who has already determined, with a misplaced sense of pride in his own assumptions, that he was undoubtedly making headway in a direction worthwhile. And assuming still that this process was the only viable option available, and further assuming that Morell could manage to find a way to track down the beast lingering ostensibly inside of Princess Cookie, what was he then to do with it? Exorcise the thing? Reason with it? Negotiate maybe? How? Could one hope to impose terms and conditions upon the behavior of something tracked and captured in the wilds of the intellect? The thought was a bizarre one and the prospect of achieving success with it unlikely. Perhaps, it would be enough to track the beast, but also to let it live according to its own inclinations inside of her. This would seem a more agreeable proposition.

Unfortunately, however, the possibility still remained that there was no beast at all, but that the aberration plaguing her consciousness was merely a side effect of some divine, yet misunderstood purpose with which she had been imbued by the Almighty Lord Himself. She could very well have been functioning on a spiritual plane far beyond Morell’s ability to grasp, which, of course, seared any scrutiny leveled against her with the indelible brand of blasphemy. To say the least, the fear of Godly reprisal which this brand was sure to summon up only served to make the prospect of engaging in such measures as invasive Ontological Neurospelunkery seem both risky and wasteful. And thus, it was a nonstarter.”
― Ashim Shanker, Only the Deplorable

“Neruda fell asleep right away, and woke ten minutes later, as children do, when we least expected it. He appeared in the living room refreshed, and with the monogram of the pillowcase imprinted on his cheek.
    "I dreamed about the woman who dreams," he said.
    "Matilde wanted him to tell her his dream.
    "I dreamed she was dreaming about me," he said.
    "That's right out of Borges," I said.
    He looked at me in disappointment.
    "Has he written it already?"
    "If he hasn't, he'll write it sometime," I said. "It will be one of his labyrinths.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories

“A memory is just an
imagining inclined towards the past, after all. You are bound to
relive the same mistakes because you keep imagining your own memories. But consider this: The former things shall not be
remembered; the old that’ve passed. If your future, which is in desire,
can become your past, a memory like any other, then by some mysterious miracle it will become your present too”
― Vladimir Hlocky, Journeys Beyond Earth

“Mi hermana descubrió el obsequio que le habían dado. Era un horrible gato negro. Me atrevería a decir que se trataba del protagonista de mi más reciente pesadilla. ¡Maldito! Casi me muero cuando esa cosa saltó encima del televisor.”
― Diego Armando Arciniegas Malagón, Realidades y ficciones, colores y sombras

“Aquí no pasaba nada, pero todo ya se había perdido. Yo me moría por dentro; nadie, ni siquiera yo, podría dimensionar lo que aquella tragedia había derrumbado en mi interior. Si es que existe el alma, si es que yo tenía eso, seguramente ya no valdría ni siquiera un centavo. Yo era otro cadáver, un muerto más. Aunque el color de mi piel dijera otra cosa, no pertenecía a este mundo.”
― Diego Armando Arciniegas Malagón, Realidades y ficciones, colores y sombras

“The Hamartia of Esteem by Stewart Stafford

A clash of Roses has seared these temples grey,
The brash cur pack supplanting divinity's place,
Nightshade words aimed at codpiece not the face,
Inquisition's gauntlet strikes this judgement day.

A death warrant marked by slander's inked stain?
Scarred by a caricatured actor's grasping fear?
In a groundless play for a groundling's sneer?
Mannequin tyrant in a jailer playwright's disdain?

Time shall be your confessor and guide,
A guest casting stones at yourself in haste,
Purifying my beloved's fair hand, debased,
Redeem her undoing at a vengeful rabble's side.

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Eu só existo porque alguém está me lendo.”
― Tiago da Silva Cabral, A Palavra-Humana

“No matter how hopelessly miserable her life seemed, one unexpected encounter while singing on the street transformed it into miraculous bliss, forever changing her world.”
― Ema Nojman (Predrag Šiđanin))

“The sun’s rays reflected on the letters of the cover, blinding, and she hoped it symbolized the final battle. She had always known that the last book would be the most intriguing of all. Long ago she had imagined it would be a fantastic book with characters as unreliable as possible...”
― oren kerbel, Terror in Paradise

“The dangerous thing about microphones isn't that they record your voice. It's that they slowly convince you to change the script.”
― oren kerbel, Terror in Paradise

“I am the dreamer of your dreams.”
― L.C. Atencio

“Every sentence you read writes itself again behind your eyes. Every word you consume consumes a piece of you.”
― FREAKBAiT, VOiDMAN: The Book