“I remember one time when we’d just come up to the village from hunting shells on Polemy Beach and I dropped a monstrous conch on my foot.  I howled with pain, and a tree ahead of us exploded with blue and yellow macaws.  My father, who could see that I didn’t know either to attend to my foot or the feathered fireworks, laughed and whispered, ‘Pain and beauty, our constant bedfellows.  Young as a I was, I understood.”

— from “Griffin & Sabine, An Extraordinary Correspondence,” by Nick Bantock