We all know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a time when we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the p… - Joan Didion

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating — but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

"Tell me what matters," BZ said.
Nothing," Maria said."

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.