“It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.”

“You only find yourself when you disobey. Disobedience is the beginning of responsibility, I think.”

“Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.”

“It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.”

“Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.”

“Where does a story truly begin? In life, there are seldom clear-cut beginnings, those moments when we can, in looking back, say that everything started. Yet there are moments when fate intersects with our daily lives, setting in motion a sequence of events whose outcome we could never have foreseen.”