"Fiction does not hesitate to accelerate time, slow it down, project it forward or run it backward,..."

"Fiction does not hesitate to accelerate time, slow it down, project it forward or run it backward, cause it to skip over itself. It may require time to travel in a circle, to meet itself in coincidence. It can freeze an action in the middle of its performance. It can expand a single moment like the skin of a balloon or bite off a life like a thread. It can put time through the hoop of a dream, trap it inside an obsession. It can set a fragment of the past within a frame of the present and cause them to exist simultaneously."

- Eudora Welty, "Some Notes on Time in Fiction," from The Eye of the Story