"A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character."

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So the fact that there's someone who's planning what happens to the characters, writing it down, means that the characters always have a fate. And when we think about fate, we tend think of it as the thing we would have if we were literary characters, that is, if there were somebody out there, writing us.

— Daniel Kehlmann