Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are. - Vladimir Nabokov

Él me destrozó el corazón. Tú destrozaste mi vida.

There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies — a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child.