Unexpected.

Where now? Under such a heading as this, there would be brief notations of those thousands of things which all of us have seen for just a flash, a moment in our lives, which seem to be of no consequence whatever at the moment that we see them, and which live in our minds and hearts forever, which are somehow pregnant with all the joy and sorrow of the human destiny, and which we know, somehow, are therefore more important than many things of more apparent consequence. ‘Where now?’ Some quiet steps that came and passed along a leafy night-time street in summer in a little town down South long years ago; a woman’s voice, her sudden burst of low and tender laughter; then the voices and the footsteps going, silence, the leafy rustle of the tree. Where now–in these great ledger books, month after month, I wrote such things as this, not only the concrete, material record of man’s ordered memory, but all the things he scarcely dares to think he has remembered; all the flicks and darts and haunting lights that flash across the mind of man that will return unbidden at an unexpected moment: a voice once heard; a face that vanished; the way the sunlight came and went; the rustling of a leaf upon a bough; a stone, a leaf, a door.

Thomas Wolfe, from “The Story of A Novel,” in The Creative Process: Reflections on Invention in the Arts and Sciences