My Lolita remarked: "You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own"; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

Do those clowns really believe what they teach?

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

Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive. Remembered ones dress up for the occasion and sit still. Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth Power Avenue.