There is more than one history of the world. - John Crowley

Their laughter rose to the ceiling and shook hands there.

"Divorced?'

'Separated.'

He tested his thumb against the pricks of the rose. 'Women. They say you got all the freedom. Then you give them their freedom, and they don't want it.' ("Novelty")"

Paradise. A world elsewhere.
He didn't really mind that there was a long Tale being told, didn't even object any longer that he had been put to its uses; he only wanted it to continue, not to stop, to go on being muttered out endlessly by whatever powers they were who spun it, putting him to sleep with its half-heard anecdotes and going on still while he slept in his grave. He didn't want it to snatch him up in this way, startle him with high, sad, harrowing conclusions he wasn't equal to. He didn't want it to have taken his wife from him.
He didn't want to be marched off to another world he couldn't imagine; a little world that couldn't be as big as this one.
Yes it is, said the breezes that passed his ears.
It couldn't contain all seasons in their fullness, all happinesses, all griefs. It couldn't contain the history of his five senses and all that they had known.
But it does, said the breezes.
Not all of that, which was his world; and then more too.
Oh more, said the Breezes; more, much more.