“ Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams. Steven Millhauser
“ All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal. Steven Millhauser
“ Was there a turn, a change in the atmosphere? To single out a particular moment is to distort the record, for it suggests a clear history of cause and effect that can only betray our sense of what rea… Steven Millhauser
“ After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim… Steven Millhauser
“ Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white. Steven Millhauser
“ 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 isolation. Steven Millhauser
“ He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deep… Steven Millhauser
“ The swirling lines of snow were composed of separate flakes, and each flake was a cluster of separate ice crystals--scientists had counted over a hundred of them in a single flake. Under the microscop… Steven Millhauser
“ Art, he said, was a controlled madness...He said that books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you wer… Steven Millhauser
“ 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… Steven Millhauser
“ Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg. Steven Millhauser
“ I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place. Steven Millhauser
“ As I train myself to cast off words, as I learn to erase word-thoughts, I begin to feel a new world rising up around me, The old world of houses, rooms, trees and streets shimmers, wavers and tears aw… Steven Millhauser
“ 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 the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that facu… Steven Millhauser
