Steven Millhauser > Quotes

“God pity the poor novelist.”
― Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright

“All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.”
― 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 or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny . By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. 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, Dangerous Laughter

“So imagine a fire going -- wood snapping the way it does when it’s a little green — the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains -- and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys -- and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning.
And so you dare to be happy.
You do that thing.
You dare.”
― Steven Millhauser

“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

“I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.”
― Steven Millhauser, In The Penny Arcade

“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 away, revealing another universe as startling as fire. We are shut off from the fullness of things. Words hide the world. They blur together elements that exist apart, or they break elements into pieces bind up the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception. But the unbound world, the world behind the world – how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous. At rare moments of clarity, I succeed in breaking through. Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known, because nothing is shaped in advance by words. There, nothing is hidden from me. There, every object presents itself entirely, with all its being. It's as if, looking at a house, you were able to see all four sides and both roof slopes. But then, there's no “house,” no “object,” no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into one another, pullulating, a fullness, a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on me from every direction. I become what I see. I am earth, I am air. I am all. My eyes are suns. My hair streams among the galaxies.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

“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, Dangerous Laughter

“Un libro es una máquina para fabricar sueños. Está hecho para sacarte de este mundo.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

“I thought of myself, in those days, as someone in disguise—beneath the obedient son, beneath the straight-A student, the agreeable well-brought-up boy with his friends and his ping-pong and his semiofficial girlfriend, there was another being, restless, elusive, mocking, disruptive, imperious, and this shadowy underself had nothing to do with that other one who laughed with his friends and went to school dances and spent summer afternoons at the beach.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

“Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg.”
― Steven Millhauser

“Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.”
― Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright

“I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

“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 were seeing with your eyes.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

“I expected no miracles; I wasn't young enough for dreams; I knew in my bones that I couldn't escape my troubles by changing the view from my window.”
― Steven Millhauser

“Do you believe that the actor on the stage is really a villain? Let me ask you something else. If he isn't a villain, then is he a liar?”
― Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer

“The more the mouse pursues this line of of thought, the more it seems to him that the cat is a large, soft mouse.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

“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 faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said 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 were seeing with your eyes.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

“Awkward approximations, dull stammerings which cannot convey my sense of exhilaration as I seem to burst impediments, to exceed bounds of the possible, to experience, in the ruins of the human, the birth of something utterly new.”
― Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter