Best 24 quotes of Jane Alison on MyQuotes

Early in the phase of being in a female body, there's all this desire that comes at you, a lot of it hostile, a lot of it dangerous, a lot of it ruinous.

I can't say that fantasy instead of the 3D world is fine or good, but I know in my own life I have certain people I've kind of fixated upon to the point of pure fantasy. Then there's such a dilemma when here they are, and they're getting ever less and less like the way the fantasy has them.

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

I grew up flying over oceans and moving and sailing.

I know that I was able to find my way out of most of my feelings by writing.

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

I sometimes think that we expect too much resolution in this world.

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

I was born in Australia and grew up in the foreign services. I had this kind of trans-Pacific life. I think I was always sort of oriented towards here's Australia and here's America and here's the Pacific.

I wouldn't underestimate the power of writing a letter.

Like a lot of writers, I just got sick to death of conventional fiction. I absolutely couldn't stand the illusion of reality and plot. I just couldn't stomach it.

My first memory is on a ship from California back to Sydney. Water is just a natural place of home and not home.

Sometimes there isn't a way to hug and make everything better.

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

That was one of the problems with the Narcissus figure. Here is a face looking at a face, and the problem is the image of the thing is never actually the thing. You try and grab it and it's not there. It's water. It disappears.

There's a lot of water in everything I've ever written. There's always oceans and pools.

There's a quote that I learned in college a million years ago. "Happy, thought I, is the man who can, in one and the same embrace, hold both his love and the object of his love." Holding the feeling that you have and all the images that you've got and all the fantasies and romantic associations while also holding the actual core person that's been saddled with all of this.

The state of love is this constant flux back and forth between who's saving and who's rescuing, who's wanting and not wanting, who's needing and who isn't. It's always going back and forth between two people who are actually attached.

When you get immersed in whatever you're writing, the world does suddenly get so filtered through what you're writing. And then of course what you're writing then filters the world right back.

When you're waiting for a bus, the thing to do is smoke a cigarette.

You can sometimes find something good on the other side of doing something very, very painful.

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.

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.