“Was sorrow, in the end, a private thing? A closed container? Something that, like a bucket of water, could be borne only on a single pair of shoulders?”

“Love is like water from the ocean." Damiana said. "You cannot empty it dry. Take bucket after bucket of water out of the Cormeon Sea, and there is still more water left than you could ever use up. That's what love's like.”

“Looks like you could use a hand," he observed. "Or maybe a bucket.""A bucket?""Of water. I hear that's what they use on fire." The guy smirked. "Unless you've got a better idea.”

“A single red bucket dangled from a single spoke like the last fruit of summer, or like autumn's final leaf.”

“Even a fool recognizes that there is great sadness in a bucket of tears. But only a wise man thinks to conserve water and use that bucket to wash his car.”

“It is nothing but a kind of microcosmos of communism—all that psychiatry,' rumbled Pnin, in his answer to Chateau. 'Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?”