She thought (...) of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted… - Vladimir Nabokov

She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds.

The term "bend sinister" means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy). This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world. The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one.

A jövő azonban mit sem törődik érzéseinkkel és fantáziálásunkkal. A jövő minden pillanatban a szétágazó lehetőségek végtelenje.