"Storytelling is imaginative and creative in nature.  It is an act by which man strives to realize his capacity for wonder, meaning and delight.  It is also a process in which man invests and preserves himself in the context of ideas.  Man tells stories in order to understand his experience, whatever it may be.  The possibilities of storytelling are precisely those of understanding the human experience." 

-N. Scott Momaday, “The Man Made of Words”