McCurry could have tried a quote attributed to Hermann Weyl to get out of his dilemma: "My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."
Now there's an unexpected reference
Part of my PhD was a review of some of the discarded theories to attempt to unify electromagnetism and gravitation: one of those was Weyl's. It's a nice example of how even theoretical physics is strangely experimental. He wrote down an elegant theory, that every particle carried with it it's own notion of length, a "gauge". Variations in the length of this gauge could then give rise to a phenomenon like an EM field. However, a lot of mathematics eventually made the prediction that each particle would have its own personal spectrum, which is not at all what is observed. Hence the confrontation between truth and beauty. Otoh, the notion of "gauge field" hung about, not for length but for various forms of direction in extra dimensions, so the standard model of particle physics is still a gauge theory.
The Truth vs Beauty conundrum is also remembered in one pair of quarks, which are called Truth and Beauty in some labs (but more often Top and Bottom, last time I looked, long ago).
A similar situation arose with Ed Witten's work on String Fields: it was supposed to be physics, but no one has ever found any observations to support it. Eventually he was given a Field's Medal (for mathematics) rather than a Nobel for physics. As it happens, back in the 80's a lot of this stuff was being discussed and written down at the annual Summer School of theoretical physics in Les Houches, where I was on holiday last week. I was out cycling and saw a sign pointing up the hill the "L'école de physique". I had to go