it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

Jhumpa Lahiri, My Life’s Sentences (via azspot)

On Interactive Lit and the fancy Media-Labby Writing happening at MIT Erica says, she always thought that she was the one who was supposed to arrange words into sequences, and then to sequence the sequences into larger sets thereafter.