Joshua Nomen-Mutatio’s Profile

“At night, when he is sure his father is sleeping, he sticks the phonograph needle in a rubber eraser and holds the eraser in his front teeth. Carefully, with his nose inches from the record, he sets the needle down. With a hiss and crackle, the music reverberates through the hollows of his mouth and throat without making a sound in the room. Ignoring the cramp in his neck, this is how he listens to his favorite records night after night.”
― Lydia Peelle, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing: Stories

“I happen to believe that the deepest value of fiction is that, in its very fictiveness, it is the one arena where we can, at least temporarily, take apart and refuse to compete within the terms that the rest of existence insists on. Market value may come to drive out all other human values, except, perhaps, in the country of invented currency, the completely barter-driven economy of the imagination. Fiction, when it remembers its innate priority over other human transactions, can deal not in price but in worth. And that seems to me an act filled with political potential, as well as with pleasure.”
― Richard Powers

“[T]hey gave thanks that they were permitted to see so much, and begged for forgiveness for their desire to see more.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“The man in ecstasy and the man drowning—both throw up their arms.”
― Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks