There are too many ironies in the fire! - John Leonard

Monotheism was a terrible idea, leading directly to Lenin.

When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things.

It makes me itchy, this wry fatalism, but it doesn't make me itch nearly as much as the heroes of so many other modern novels for whom stalking the savage libido is more fun than kinship or community; who will leave town either to find their callow selves, as if they'd lost anything important, or, more transgressively, to kill a bear, a bull, a whale, a unicorn, a hippogriff, a signifier or, preferably, their fathers.