Metawritings Quotes

“I think language beautifully full of the poetry of immanent clarification of some small pinprick of what living might mean. Fuck. Why else would anyone care to spend a life writing sentences?”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“A shattered narrative is still a narrative. We can't escape it, it is what we are.”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“What would she have thought as a teenage girl arranging her artfully wasted limbs against the dais of a highly conceptual sculpture?”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“I like it when art presents a paradigm shift, when it forces me to confront my assumptions, when it asks, "Why this way and not another way?”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“Okay, let's say that a metamove or metagesture is when the author intentionally draws attention to a work's genre, its very existence as fiction or nonfiction.”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“Then one day, I just let it go, and started thinking about the essay as not trying to solve a riddle of why, but as a way of understanding what was changed by my fear, and what that change revealed about my experience of seventh grade.”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“Everyone now, not just writers, creates a written, published persona on a daily (hourly) basis. Artifice abounds.”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“I am writing this because they cannot.”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“metawriting can be viewed as "the act of doing something outside of the game in order to impact what is actually occurring in the game.”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“sometimes it is necessary for us all to pretend together that language can really mean.”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“WHEN IT WAS DECIDED (When was that again, and by whom?) that we were all supposed to choose between fiction and nonfiction, what was not taken into account was that for some of us truth can never be an absolute, that there can (at best) be only less true and more true and sometimes those two collapse inside each other like aTurducken.”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“A mind that moves associatively (as my mind does and probably your mind too) like a firefly in a grassy yard on a late June evening, has more fun (and other things too, of course, like static, like trouble) than a mind that moves logically or even chronologically.”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“There are so many of us out there, trying to turn Spyrograph flowers into rocket ships.”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“linear narrative was not doing a very good job representing life as I experienced it,”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

“write down all of the things out in the world that have arrested your attention lately, that have glimmered at you in some resonant way. Set them next to each other. See what happens.”
― Jill Talbot, Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction