Vladimir Nabokov. Aureliana
Although once or twice he had had the chance to switch to a more profitable business—selling cloth, for instance, instead of moths—he stubbornly held on to his shop as the symbolic link between his dreary existence and the phantom of perfect happiness. What he craved for, with a fierce, almost morbid intensity, was himself'to net the rarest butterflies of distant countries, to see them in flight with his own eyes, to