This saying is also attributed to Stéphane Mallarmé, for where quotations begin is in a cloud.

Paul Valéry also described his perception of first lines so vividly, and to my mind so accurately, that I have never forgotten it: the opening line of a poem, he said, is like finding a fruit on the ground, a piece of fallen fruit you have never seen before, and the poet’s task is to create the tree from which such a fruit would fall.

In the beginning was the Word. Western civilization rests upon those words. And yet there is a lively group of thinkers who believe that in the beginning was the Act. that nothing can precede action—