Where stories come from

The tension is between finding ever more detail about atomic structure, and the story. It could be the equivalent of somebody looking at an old film, and realizing that the film came from a projector, and discovering that there is an image in the projector, and that it’s made of molecules of grains of film — and then trying to find the mystery of the story by looking at ever more detailed molecules of film, thinking, If I finally get to the heart of that, will it tell me where my story comes from? While we know these are two separate universes.

Rebecca Mead, “Particle Follies”