All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born. - 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.

Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer.

With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a grey neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples.