Avoid stories, unless short, pointed, and quite apropos. He who deals in them, says Swift, must either have a very large stock, or a good memory, or must often change his company. Some have a set of them hung together like onions: they take possession of the conversation by an early introduction of one; and then you must have the whole rope, and there is an end of everything else, perhaps, for that meeting, though you may have heard all twenty times before.

Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay, 1880