Joshua Nomen-Mutatio

“I have in my head things I may not have exactly seen, just as you who read this have me.”
― Joseph McElroy, Lookout Cartridge

“I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.”
― Sam Lipsyte, Home Land

“[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

“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