"This could only be an eruption of an initial, senseless rage, one told oneself.
It was a piteous wail, and its human shape was irresistible even after one told oneself it was a fox, even after Hanwell pushed the greenery away with a long stick to reveal the trembling fox itself, collapsed on its knees upon the ground.
One can tell oneself, when it comes to Kagan, that Obama knows her well.
In the nineteen-eighties, when a previous generation of would-be jihadists in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere would say, "We love death as others love life," one could tell oneself that it was mostly braggadocio.
In the panic maths one does to justify expense, the latte is a reliable unit, small enough to seem trivial but still a luxury one tells oneself to forgo in tough times.
Each individual's existence as an autonomous being must constantly be re-affirmed through the story one tells oneself, and the greatest danger is the possibility of losing one's personal narrative and becoming completely empty inside.
Locking or not locking, it would seem, has more to do with one's internal geography than with the externals — or, as Ms. Braverman puts it, the stories one tells oneself: I am a free and easy person who is more concerned that my house is open to any friend who wants to drop by than with possessions.
A racket is a state of being, Sophie explained, a story one tells oneself where one is a victim in a permanent state of complaint.
On the flipside, she says, "Lock it in" is an empowering way of telling oneself to hold onto the "the incredibly positive feelings that often accompany working... like a sense of mastery and accomplishment, external validation, and the opportunity to eat a meal without someone spilling milk on you".
Nonetheless, Mad soldiers on, determined to prove that subtlety is the enemy of parody and that the funniest joke is one told on oneself -- especially if it includes the word "moron".
The unity of one's life consists in the coherence of the story one can tell about oneself.
