All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

The line reduces narrative to two archetypal plot engines: departure and arrival. “A man goes on a journey” points to stories driven by quest, transformation, and the testing of character through movement across space and experience. “A stranger comes to town” captures the disruptive entrant—an outsider whose presence exposes a community’s hidden tensions, hypocrisies, or desires. As a piece of critical shorthand, the aphorism highlights how much literature depends on change introduced either by the protagonist’s leaving the familiar or by the unfamiliar entering the familiar. Its popularity also reflects a modern taste for elegant, compressive formulas about storytelling.