Home > Work > All Those Vanished Engines
1 " Every character in a story, I thought when I had folded up the phone, has both a purpose and a secret purpose. "
― Paul Park , All Those Vanished Engines
2 " And you’re disappointed in the story. I know you wanted a love story. "
3 " I thought you could build a story that would function as a machine or else a complex of machines, each one moving separately, yet part of a process that ultimately would produce an emotion or a sequence of emotions. You could swap out parts, replace them if they got too old. And this time you would build in some redundancy, if only just to handle the stress.One question was: Would the engine still work if you were aware of it, or if you were told how it actually functioned? Maybe this was one of the crucial differences between a story and a machine. "
4 " The heroine might be unsure. And the reader. But I don’t think the author should be. "
5 " There’s nothing cruel about a vampire or a parasite, she said. "
6 " Ah, how hard it was, even half-delirious or asleep, to conceive of something new! "
7 " So maybe it wasn’t even true that I could choose to share in the world’s future. It wasn’t a matter of simple nostalgia. For a long time, for many people and certainly for me, the past had taken the future’s place, as any hope or sense of forward progress had dried up and disappeared. But now, as I aged, more and more the past had taken over the present also, because the past was all we had. "
