Old love letters

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

—Vladimir Nabokov, from Speak, Memory





This quote, despite its rather jarring simile, is apropos of Valentine's Day, of first loves, and memories. In a blessed way, they are all to me bound up in the same person. Happy 37th Valentine's Day, Cheryl. —Wayne S.