Stuff from Books: No One You Know

Just finished reading Michelle Richmond's No One You Know. Quick read, suspenseful and moving, and filled with a few great quotes. Here are some I like:

A requote from Graham Greene's The End of the Affair:  A story has no beginning or end, arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

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Every story is an invention, subject to the whims of the author. For the audience on the other side of the page, the words march forward with a certain inevitability--as if the story could exist one way only, the way in which it is written. But there is never just one way to tell a story. Someone has chosen who will emerge as the hero or heroine, and who will play the villain. Each choice is made at the expense of an infinite number of variations. Who is to say which version of the story is true?

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Sunrise had a way of putting an end to intimacy; the vulnerabilities men displayed in the middle of the night seemed to disappear with the moon and stars.

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The seed of every relationship's demise is always apparent, even from the very first moment. If you look closely at the beginning, you will always be able to see the end.

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It's just a story. You can take it or leave it. Stories aren't set in stone.

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There is no such thing as a perfect ending, no such thing as an infallible narrative map. Arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. Every story is flawed, every story is subject to change. Even after it is set down in print, between the covers a book, a story is not immune to alteration. People can go on telling it in their own way, remembering it the way they want. And in each telling the ending may change, or even the beginning. Inevitably, in some cases it will be worse, and in others it just might be better. A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.