"Why are you writing this book?" the Mouse asked. "I mean what do you want to do with it?"
"Why do you play your syrynx? I'm sure it's for essentially the same reason."
"Only if I spent all that time just getting ready, I'd never play a thing; and that's a hint."
"I begin to understand, Mouse. It's not my aim, but my methods of achieving it which bug you, as it were."
"Katin, I do understand what you're doing. You want to make something beautiful. But it don't work that way. Sure, I had to practice a long time to be able to play this thing. But if you're going to make something like that, it's got to make people feel and thrill to the life around them, even if it's only that one guy who goes looking for it in the Alkane's cellar. It won't make it if you don't understand some of that feeling yourself."
"Mouse, you're a fine, good, and beautiful person. You just happened to be wrong is all. Those beautiful forms you wield from your harp, I've looked at your face closely enough to know how much they're impelled by terror."
The Mouse looked up and wrinkles scored his forehead.
"I could sit and watch you play for hours. But they're only momentary joys, Mouse. It's only when all one knows of life is abstracted and used as an underlining statements of significant patterning that you have what is both beautiful and permanent. Yes, there is an area of myself I haven't been able to tap for this work, one that flows and fountains in you, gushes from your fingers. But there's a large part of you that's playing to drown the sound of someone screaming in there."
Excerpt from Nova - by Samuel R. Delany