Arcadia / Iain Pears

People are naturally so fond of themselves that they assume the past must lead to them. They have egos of such size that they cannot imagine it doing otherwise. Rather like biologists of the past imagining the whole of evolution leading to Homo sapiens, so that we almost become the point of evolution, or religious types assuming that the world was created to give us somewhere nice to live, so those who concern themselves with time assume that the only purpose of the past is to produce the present, with us as the lead characters. (Angela Meerson)