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A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
--
Bk. 1, ch. 1

 

Graham Greene

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He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.

 

Harry Emerson Fosdick

 

Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.

 

Robert Penn Warren

 

I walk up the stairs to my fourth-floor apartment, all alone. I let myself into my tiny little studio, all alone. I shut the door behind me. Another early bedtime in Rome. Another long night's sleep ahead of me, with nobody and nothing in my bed except a pile of Italian phrase books and dictionaries.
I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone.
Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees, and press my forehead against the floor. There I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks.
First in English.
Then in Italian.
And then — just to get the point across — in Sanskrit. 
And since I am already down there in supplication on the floor, let me hold that position as I reach back in time three years earlier to the moment where this entire story began — a moment that also found me in this exact same posture: on my knees, on a floor, praying.

 

Elizabeth Gilbert

 

Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion. Art should not, it seems to me, pose the “real” as a preoccupation. Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called “realist” novels — they’re nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain sensory truth — the true feeling of a character — that is all.

 

Francoise Sagan

 

Surrender is surrender to this moment, not to a story through which you interpret this moment and then try to resign yourself to it. ... Can you accept the isness of this moment and not confuse it with a story the mind has created around it?

 

Eckhart Tolle