" Gil waited, waited just a few more seconds before picking up and in that stretrched instant she felt the promise of revelation curl, evaporate and vanish; watched in despair as it slipped for ever through her mind's grasping fingers. Even before she heard her daughter's first, broken words, she knew that it was too late. The pattern she had been searching for had gone. Worse than that - it had never existed. How could it? What she had been hoping for was a figment, a dream an impossible thing: like the rain before it falls. "

― Jonathan Coe , The Rain Before it Falls