The moral sense in mortals is the dutyWe have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.
She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible -- and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary -- fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat s...
I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demente...
Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece
He could swear he did not look back, could not—by any optical chance, or in any prism—have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite pi...
For we die every day; oblivion thrivesNot on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,And our best yesterdays are now foul pilesOf crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.
Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.
Bueno, algún día, si quieres venirte a vivir conmigo… Crearé un nuevo Dios y le agradeceré con gritos desgarradores si me das una esperanza microscópica.
A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.
In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth ... and wondering with an immortal Alice at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles - no matte...
Even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.
A little downy girl still wearing poppiesstill eating popcorn in the colored gloamwhere tawny Indians took paid croppersbecause you stole herfrom her wax-browed and dignified protectorspitting into hi...
Time means succession, and succession, change: Hence timelessness is bound to disarrange Schedules of sentiment.
There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita...
The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty
The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached to the girls' college where I t...
Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality - the deception was bearable.
Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.
Nothing is more occult than the way letters, under the auspices of unimaginable carriers, circulate through the weird mess of civil wars; but whenever, owing to that mess, there was some break in our...
Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken t...