"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."
- Excerpt from The White Album, Joan Didion's book of essays published in 1979
