Meaning is different from happiness. Included in meaning is poverty and other unhappy states…Our greatest desire, greater even than the desire for happiness, is that our lives mean something. This desire for meaning is the originating impulse of story. We tell stories because we hope to find or create significant connections between things. Stories link past, present, and future in a way that tells us where we have been (even before we were born), where we are, and where we could be going. Our stories teach us that there is a place for us that we fit, they suggest to us that our lives can have a plot. Stories turn mere chronology, one thing after another, into the purposeful action of plots, and thereby into meaning.

—The Healing Power of Stories, Daniel Taylor, 1996