'Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being 'like this'/  Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.  The mind receives a myriad of impressions -- trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.  From all sides they come, an incessant shower or unnumerable atoms; amd as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work uon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewed on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.  Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of conciousness to the end.'

-Virginia Woolf, 1925