Quotes from Jane Alison

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.

This stream of watching made what was watched wanted.

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.

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.

Just as there can be a hole in these narratives, a memoir can be as much about what's forgotten as what's remembered.

In order to have a real life of any romance, there has to be a level of fantasy.

I don't think you can have an imagination without having fantasy, and you can't have that rich a life without an imagination.

Teaching writing puts you on the point of a pin in terms of what you want your own writing to be.

You have to want something or you're finished.

I think sometimes to still be angry is appropriate, but you want to be able to live with it.

I suppose you retire from trying. If you retire from trying, you think, "Maybe love will just come my way if I don't want it anymore."

I've always wanted to figure out how to do a walking story. I'd never figured out how to do one and have it work or be interesting or have anything that it's about.