Setting It Bent

In Geography and Plays (1922) Gertrude Stein writes of "the landscape not moving but always being in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky and then any detail to any other detail, the story is only of importance if you like to tell or hear a story but the relation is there anyway" (125).

And this from Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable (1953), with no page citation given because I have long committed it to memory: "No need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas as life alone is enough."