I Think My Favorite Fact About Myself

I Do Not Know If It Has Ever Been Noted Before That One Of The Main Characteristics Of Life Is Discreteness. Unless A Film Of Flesh Envelopes Us, We Die. Man Exists Only Insofar As He Is Separated From His Surroundings. The Cranium Is A Space-traveler's Helmet. Stay Inside Or You Perish. Death Is Divestment, Death Is Communion. It May Be Wonderful To Mix With The Landscape, But To Do So Is The End Of The Tender Ego.

My Private Tragedy, Which Cannot, And Indeed Should Not, Be Anybody's Concern, Is That I Had To Abandon My Natural Idiom, My Untrammeled, Rich, And Infinitely Docile Russian Tongue For A Second-rate Brand Of English, Devoid Of Any Of Those Apparatuses–the Baffling Mirror, The Black Velvet Backdrop, The Implied Associations And Traditions–which The Native Illusionist, Frac-tails Flying, Can Magically Use To Transcend The Heritage In His Own Way.

The Good, The Admirable Reader Identifies Himself Not With The Boy Or The Girl In The Book, But With The Mind That Conceived And Composed That Book.

Literature And Butterflies Are The Two Sweetest Passions Known To Man.

There Is Nothing Dictators Hate So Much As That Unassailable, Eternally Elusive, Eternally Provoking Gleam. One Of The Main Reasons Why The Very Gallant Russian Poet Gumilev Was Put To Death By Lenin's Ruffians Thirty Odd Years Ago Was That During The Whole Ordeal, In The Prosecutor's Dim Office, In The Torture House, In The Winding Corridors That Led To The Truck, In The Truck That Took Him To The Place Of Execution, And At That Place Itself, Full Of The Shuffling Feet Of The Clumsy And Gloomy Shooting Squad, The Poet Kept Smiling.