“There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.”

“I suppose the pain of parting will be red and loud.”

“And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears.”

“Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up.”

“I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world- nymphet love. (135)”

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

“How many were the aquarelles she painted for me; what a revelation it was when she showed me the lilac tree that grows out of mixed blue and red! Sometimes, in our St Petersburg house, from a secret compartment in the wall of her dressing room (and my birth room), she would produce a mass of jewelry for my bedtime amusement. I was very small then, and those flashing tiaras and chokers and rings seemed to me hardly inferior in mystery and enchantment to the illumination in the city during imperial fêtes, when, in the padded stillness of a frosty night, giant monograms, crowns, and other armorial designs, made of coloured electric bulbs - sapphire, emerald, ruby - glowed with a kind of charmed constraint above snow-lined cornices on housefronts along residential streets.”