Humans, above all, fear intelligence. …Humans, scared out of their minds, gather whatever intelligence they can put their hands on and put it all in a central penitentiary named facts.
“It is important to begin when everything is already over… There were worse jokes his blood might have played on him. Its message might have read: All beginnings imply an apocalypse… He awoke the next morning tangled in first lines like wrinkled sheets.”
Robert Coover