"So he stood back in the world again, in the Mojave Desert; and the whole world was a simulation, a perfect fiction. A book that actually was blank. Nothing wrote it, but itself; and how this could be was the greatest mystery. For if he could read it properly he knew that all the words would disappear."
— Ian Watson (The Miracle Visitors)

"She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night."
— Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)

"As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight"
— William Carlos Williams (Spring and All)

"A twittering canary called its headless mother in a voice cemetery beyond the sea. Five kinds of apricot were poisoned by mail - a special sort of process."
— Kenneth Koch (The red robins)