" I did my best to tell him, but I felt even as I did so that it was all wrong, and finally I blurted out, as he wrote angrily on his sheets, “But none of that matters at all.” His head raised to stare balefully at me, but I said, incoherent yet convinced, “It’s just—a way to go. There isn’t only one way to go.” I waved at his notes. “You’re trying to find a road where there isn’t one. It’s like—it’s gleaning in the woods,” I said abruptly. “You have to pick your way through the thickets and the trees, and it’s different every time. "

― Naomi Novik , Uprooted