Steven Millhauser Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

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
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
All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

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
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
I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

Steven Millhauser
Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

Steven Millhauser
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