As though nothing (Shepard)

It seemed to him all they had undergone and felt and done would one day be diminished and relegated to mere narrative, its heroes oversimplified or their heroic natures overborne by the mundanity of detail, a story so degraded, so shorn of wonderment by telling and re-telling that—despite love and redemption, suffering and loss, mystery and death—it would be in the end as though nothing had happened.

Lucius Shepard, from "The Skull"