We all have such fateful objects — it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another — carefully chosen by the gods to attract events … - Vladimir Nabokov

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness — in a landscape selected at random — is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern — to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

Monstrously Remote: “Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I immediately draw radii from my love — from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter — to monstrously remote points of the universe… the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.” – Speak Memory (1966)

The Girl Scout’s motto is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as — well, never mind what. My duty is — to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I am cheerful. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word, and deed.