In the Penny Arcade Book

When I read books by Steven Millhauser I have a feeling that he has arrived from some faraway fairyland full of magic and rainbows.
…the Untermensch was a strictly spiritual term, and by it he meant the kind of soul that, in the presence of anything great, or noble, or beautiful, or original, instinctively longed to pull it down and reduce it to a common level. The Untermensch did this always in the name of some resounding principle: patriotism, for example, or the spirit of mankind, or social progress, or morality, or truth.
The Untermensch is an underman, an aesthetical underdog, a ubiquitous pharisee shaping opinions of the silent majority.
August Eschenburg, presumably inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann's dark tale The Sand-Man, is a powerful parable of pop-culture, fashion and ideology: art against kitsch, genius and mediocrity, artist versus artisan…
I'm a playful fellow - It's my artistic nature. Look, I know them: they're swine. I supply them with troughs. It amuses me; many things do.
A Protest Against the Sun, The Sledding Party and A Day in the Country are sad stories of solitude and angst…
The moon shocked her: it was burning white. It had burned the blackness out of the sky, leaving a radiant dark blue. She felt like breaking off a piece of the moon and pressing it against her forehead, plunging it into her mouth. She felt crazed. Tears streamed along her face.
Snowmen, In the Penny Arcade and Cathay belong to the genre of magic realism.
Cathay is marvelously and mysteriously poetic…
Those who have stood in the shadow of the dragon say it is accompanied by an icy wind. The tail of a dragon, glittering in the light of the sun, is said to be covered with blue and yellow scales. The head of a dragon is emerald and gold, its tongue scarlet, its eyes pits of fire. It is said that the venom which drips from its terrible jaws is hotter than boiling pitch. It is said that to see a dragon is to be changed forever. Some do not believe in dragons, because they have not seen them; it is like not believing in one's own death, because one has not yet died.
Snowmen and In the Penny Arcade are tales of childhood and adolescence and coming of age…
A desolation had fallen over the creatures of the penny arcade. Even the real, live people strolling noisily about had become infected with the general woodenness; their laughter sounded forced, their gestures seemed exaggerated and unconvincing. I felt caught in an atmosphere of decay and disappointment.
We grow up and the miracles of our childhood turn into the ordinary shabby things.