“No individual element in your story, including the hero, will work unless you first create it and define it in relation to all the other elements.”

“You are missing a key element to the story. Maybe the moral of the legend is that we are all carved, created, and formed by a master hand. Maybe we are all works of art.”

“Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.”

“Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.”

“I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.”

“that in every individual a spiritual element is manifested that gives life to all that exists, and that this spiritual element strives to unite with everything of a like nature to itself, and attains this aim through love.”