I pay out my line

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand, you must see your left hand erasing it.

Impossible of course.

I pay out my line, I say out my line, this black thread I'm spinning across the page."

- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, 2000.