"Man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker buoys and trail signs of stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he´s about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life."

—Graham Swift, Waterland