from ursula leguin’s introduction to the left hand of darkness:

the artist deals with what cannot be said in words.  the artist whose medium is fiction does this in words.  the novelist says in words what cannot be said in words…a sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.

and, the story’s first sentence:

i’ll make my report as if i told a story, for i was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of imagination.