"It had been a very long and ragged and incredibly interlocked and detailed river shore. Then a funny thing happened. It had been broken up, sliced up into pieces. Some of the pieces had been folded and compressed into bales. Some of them had been cut into still smaller pieces and used for ornaments and as Indian medicine. Rolled and baled pieces of the shore came to rest in barns and old warehouses, in attics, in caves. Some were buried in the ground. And yet the river itself still exists physically, as do its shores, and you may go and examine them. But the shore you will see along the river now is not quite the same as that old shore that was broken up and baled into bales and rolled onto rollers, not quite the same as the pieces you will find in attics and caves."  —R. A. Lafferty