"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in
the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We
interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a
narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have
learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual
experience."
-- Joan Didion, The White Album.