“But in order to make you understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story—and there are so many, and so many—stories of childhood, stories of school, love, marriage, death, and so on; and none of them are true. Yet like children we tell each other stories, and to decorate them we make up these ridiculous flamboyant, beautiful phrases. How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of these phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of paper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably.”

*Virginia Woolf, The Waves