" Life doesn't happen to us in stories. Life is this undifferentiated wash of experience over us which we turn into story, that we impose form on, and that we need to impose form on to find the patterns that will help us see where we've been and where we might be going. To know ourselves. And that means leaving out almost everything. That means highlighting this, de-emphasizing that, moving this off to the wings. It's amazing that any of us can be in the same room and make sense to each other at the end of that. But somehow we do. "

― Tobias Wolff