This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one … - Vladimir Nabokov

I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy; lust is never quite sure — even when the velvety victim is locked up in one's dungeon — that some rival devil or influential god may still not abolish one's prepared triumph.

Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known...

If I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man's logic and no man's ecstatic fits may force me to find less silly my impossibly silly position: that of God's slave; no, not his slave even, but just a match which is aimlessly struck and then blown out by some inquisitive child, the terror of his toys.