{"quotes":[{"text":"Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It’s all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.","author":"Thomas C. Foster","tags":["arbitrariness","grammar","language","literature"],"id":25583,"author_id":"Thomas+C.+Foster"},{"text":"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.","author":"Graham Greene","tags":["arbitrariness","beginning","creative-process","end","storytelling","writing"],"id":63069,"author_id":"Graham+Greene"},{"text":"I had had a feeling of freedom because of the sudden change in my life. By comparison to what had come before, I felt immensely free. But then, once I became used to that freedom, even small tasks became more difficult. I placed constraints on myself, and filled the hours of the day. Or perhaps it was even more complicated than that. Sometimes I did exactly what I wanted to do all day—I lay on the sofa and read a book, or I typed up an old diary—and then the most terrifying sort of despair would descend on me: the very freedom I was enjoying seemed to say that what I did in my day was arbitrary, and that therefore my whole life and how I spent it was arbitrary.","author":"Lydia Davis","tags":["action","arbitrariness","freedom"],"id":158475,"author_id":"Lydia+Davis"},{"text":"We possess art lest we perish of the truth.","author":"Friedrich Nietzsche","tags":["arbitrariness","art","life","meaning","reality","vapidity"],"id":257367,"author_id":"Friedrich+Nietzsche"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":4,"pages":1}}