The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty. - Vladimir Nabokov

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.

Some people-and I am one of them-hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam.

From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed between gardens, and a heraldic butterfly volant en arrière, sable, a bend gules, traversed the stone parapet, and John Shade took a fresh card.