So Big and Strange and it's all Too Much at Once

"My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes, as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at 

Baker Street, "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would

 not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out

 of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep 

in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, 

the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through 

generation, and leading to the outre results, it would make 

all fiction with its conventionalities and 

foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable."

-Arthur Conan Doyle, the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, A Case of Identity