Mythology of Blue

• 2013-02-22

  I felt myself vanishing into blue.

  — 

  Steven Millhauser, “Flying Carpets” from The Paris Review’s Object Lessons

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• 2012-07-23

  It is night now. Through my window I can hear the waves falling against the shore. The waves fall in irregular lines, in one place and then another, so that there is always the sound of the sea, louder and softer. But now and then, if one listens very carefully, one can hear something else, hidden between or within the waves, and revealed suddenly, as behind a swiftly drawn curtain: the nothing — the nothing — the nothing at all.

  -Steven Millhauser, The King in the Tree

• 2012-07-14

  Who are you? I am the one I no longer am.

  — Steven Millhauser 

• 2012-07-10

  Fiction is an adventure or it’s nothing—nothing at all. What’s an adventure? An invitation to wonder and danger. If what I write doesn’t lead a reader into the woods, away from the main path, then it’s a failure. Somebody else wrote it. I disown it.

  — Steven Millhauser, BOMB interview

• 2012-07-09

  I thought about that time in a dim, puzzled way, as if I’d read about it in some book I could no longer remember.

  — Steven Millhauser, The King in the Tree

• 2012-06-26

  The Black Wind

  Then it all came rushing into me, a black wind. Do you know it, the black wind? It’s the wind after the first wind. It’s the wind that comes rushing in when you think the worst is over, sweeping you clean, till you feel like a room without furniture.

  -Steven Millhauser, The King in the Tree

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  We walk through a world continually disappearing from view. One thing fiction does is restore the hidden and vanishing world. It makes the blind see. It gives us the mystic’s vision: the universe in a grain of sand…That’s what I meant when I said that I want fiction to unbind my eyes.

  — Steven Millhauser, BOMB interview

• 2012-06-25

  The highest expression of beauty is nothing but a rare and enigmatic form of ugliness.

• 2012-06-17

  Just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning.

  — Steven Millhauser, The King in the Tree

• 2012-06-13

  Novels are hungry, monstrous. Their apparent delicacy is deceptive—they want to devour the world.

  — Steven Millhauser, BOMB interview