a most important source of creative imagination is a piercing pity
for the tin box in a waste patch
for the cigarette card from the series National Costumes trampled in the mud
for the poor, stray word repeated by the kind-hearted, weak, loving creature
who has just been scolded for nothing
for all the trash of life
which by means of a momentary alchemic distillation
is turned into something valuable and eternal.
-Vladimir Nabokov
