“It is morning, and time to get up; and today I must go on with the story.  Or the story must go on with me, carrying me inside it along the track I must travel, straight to the end, weeping like a train and deaf and single-eyed and locked tight shut; although I hurl myself against the walls of it and scream and cry, and beg to God himself to let me out.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids and all aboard powerless to stop it.  It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.  When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”

From Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, 298.