Meaning

   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 live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the shifting "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shift phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
    Or at least we do for a while.  
                                        Joan Didion - The White Album