Steven Millhauser Quotes

13 quotes in 325 categories

• I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.
• I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.
• Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.
• Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.
• I’m pleased by anything in myself that strikes me as not myself.
• We know nothing. Absolutely nothing.
• And again it snowed, and again the sun came out. In the mornings on the way to the station Franklin counted the new snowmen that…
• God pity the poor novelist.
• So imagine a fire going -- wood snapping the way it does when it’s a little green — the wind rattling the windows behind the…
• All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.
• His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude.
• That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said…
• 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…

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