The most common-place people become highly imaginative when they are in a passion. Whole dramas of insult, injury, and wrong pass before their minds,—efforts of creative genius, for there is sometimes not a fact to go upon.

Anger is enormously creative. Given an ambiguous remark and a few hours, a mind in a temper will construct motives, a history, a whole pattern of intention, none of it built from anything that happened. The story feels like insight because it arrives with such force and detail. That force is the emotion, not the evidence.

The next time you are furious and certain, separate the facts from the construction. Write down only what was said or done, in the fewest words, and look at how thin the list is. Decide what to do from that list rather than from the drama built on top of it.