"When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a
confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and
splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the
icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's
only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are
telling it, to yourself or to someone else."
"Then something came clear to me which I used to wonder about. There is a quilt pattern called Lady of the Lake, which I thought was named for the poem; but I could never find any lady in the pattern, nor any lake. But now I saw that the boat was named for the poem, and the quilt was named for the boat; because it was a pinwheel design, which must have stood for the paddle going around. And I thought that things did make sense, and have a design to them, if only you pondered them long enough. And so perhaps it might be with recent events, which at the moment seemed to me entirely senseless; and finding out the reason for the quilt pattern was a lesson to me, to have faith."
