Among The Jumbled Heap

“Wanting to know absolutely what a story is about, and to be able to say it in a few sentences, is dangerous: it can lead us to wanting to possess a story as we possess a cup. We know the function of a cup, and we drink from it, wash it, put it on a shelf, and it remains a thing we own and control, unless it slips from our hands into the control of gravity; or unless someone else breaks it, or uses it to give us poisoned tea. A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.”

~Andre Dubus, “A Hemmingway Story” from Meditations from a Movebale Chair.