William Gaddis, The Recognitions, 1955

It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now, beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem.

[See Dylan Nice and Vladimir Nabokov.]