The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves th… - Vladimir Nabokov

"Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? "Is that a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed."

This, and much more, she accepted - for after all living did mean accepting
the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case - mere
possibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of pain
that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the
invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the
incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of
this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into
madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners;
of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to
watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as
the monstrous darkness approaches.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.