"...as i sat on the pebbles of the beach, where once your golden legs had been extended; and, as before, a wave would arrive, all out of breath, but, as it had nothing to report, it would disperse in apologetic salaams. pebbles like cuckoo eggs, a piece of tile shaped like a pistol clip, a fragment of topaz-coloured glass, something quite dry resembling a whisk of bast, my tears, a microscopic bead, an empty cigarette package with a yellow-bearded sailor in the center of a life buoy, a stone like a pompeian's foot, some creature's small bone or a spatula, a kerosene can, a shiver of garnet-red glass, a nutshell, a nondescript rusty thingum related to nothing, a shard of porcelain, of which the companion fragments must inevitably exist somewhere--and i imagined an eternal torment, a convict's task, that would serve as the best punishment for such as i, whose thoughts had ranged too far during their life span: namely, to find and gather all these parts, so as to re-create that gravy boat or soup tureen--hunchbacked wanderings along wild, misty shores. and, after all, if one is supremely lucky, one might restore the dish on the first morning instead of the trillionth..."
-vladimir nabokov.