life is no play...

"It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety..."

-from Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys

"Life is no play. We meet people once, and never see them again. There is no shape to events, no point at which we turn to the audience for phrase. No time at which we step behind the stage, to see the actors changing their wigs, and painting their faces, and muttering their lines..."
"But that is precisely where you are now. Welcome to my house...

-Will Shakespeare and Dream, in "The Sandman Volume 10: The Wake" by Neil Gaiman