My God may not be your idea of God, but one thing I know of my God he makes me a humanitarian. I am a proud Jew because we gave the world the Bible and the story of Joseph.
A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.
Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted,
Their heads being turned with praise and flattery;
And that is why their lovers are afraid
To tell them a plain story.
Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them. [Witness for the Prosecution, also published in The Hound of Death and Other Stories.]
From earliest times, humans - explorers and thinkers - have wanted to figure out the shape of their world. Forever, the way we've done that is through storytelling. It is difficult to let the truth get in the way of a good story.