“To be Kaspar Hauser is to long, at every moment of your dubious existence, with every fiber of your questionable being, not to be Kaspar Hauser. It’s to long to leave yourself completely behind, to vanish from your own sight.… — Steven Millhauser Copy Share Image
But what struck me was the book-madness of the place--books lay scattered across the unmade bed and the top of a battered-looking desk, books stood in knee-high piles on the floor, books were crammed sideways and right side up in a narrow bookcase that rose higher than my head and leaned dangerously from the wall, books sat in stacks on… — Steven Millhauser Copy Share
I’m pleased by anything in myself that strikes me as not myself. — Steven Millhauser Copy Share Image
“For what is genius, I ask you, but the capacity to be obsessed? ...We have all been geniuses, you and I; but sooner or… — Steven Millhauser Copy Share Image
“A story with a single ending seems to us a bare and diminished thing, like a tree with a single branch; and each ending… — Steven Millhauser Copy Share Image
His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude. — Steven Millhauser Copy Share Image
“... now and again we would happen to step out of the familiar universe into a sudden sharp shock of sweetly scented air, sudden… — Steven Millhauser Copy Share Image
“Martin thought of the iron El trestles winding and stretching across the city, of department store windows and hotel lobbies, of electric elevators and street-car ads, of the city pressing its way north on both sides of the great park, of dynamos and electric lights, of ten-story hotels, of the old iron tower near the depot at West Brighton with… — Steven Millhauser Copy Share
“Then solar systems, galaxies, supernovas, infinite space itself will become elements of a final masterwork--a never-ending festival, a celestial amusement park in which every… — Steven Millhauser Copy Share Image
In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen. — Steven Millhauser Copy Share Image
“... it is the purpose of this history to trace not the mere outlines of a life but the inner plan, not the external… — Steven Millhauser Copy Share Image
“Others saw in the trend still another instance of a disturbing tendency in the American suburb: the longing for withdrawal, for self-enclosure, for expensive… — Steven Millhauser Copy Share Image
Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams. — Steven Millhauser Copy Share Image
