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.

Alas! In vain historians pry and probe: The same wind blows, and in the same live robe Truth bends her head to fingers curved cupwise; And with a woman's smile and a child's care Examines something she is holding there Concealed by her own shoulder from our eyes.

Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.

But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.