Speaking of novels,’ I said, ‘you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any p...
Solitude is the playfield of Satan.
She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky,...
She had imagination — the muscle of the soul — and her imagination was of a particularly strong, almost masculine quality. She possessed, too, that real sense of beauty which has far less to do with a...
She groped for words. I supplied them mentally (' broke my heart. merely broke my life').
Reader! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was! Since his supersensitive system was loath to face the actual scene, he thought he could at least enjoy a secret part of it—which reminds one of the te...
Old Azureus's manner of welcoming people was a silent rhapsody. Ecstatically beaming, slowly, tenderly, he would take your hand between his soft palms, hold it thus as if it were a long sought treasur...
Oh, Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties?
Mas o amor, dizia ele, era tudo menos credível, a vida real era ridícula, os labregos riam-se do amor.
Look at the harlequins! [...] All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together—jokes, images—and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Pla...
Lolita, luz de mi vida, fuego de mis entrañas. Pecado mío, alma mía. Lo-li-ta: la punta de la lengua emprende un viaje de tres pasos paladar abajo hasta apoyarse, en el tercero, en el borde de los die...
Lolita, luce della mia vita, fuoco dei miei lombi. Mio peccato, anima mia. Lo-li-ta: la punta della lingua compie un percorso di tre passi sul palato per battere, al terzo, contro i denti. Lo. Li. Ta.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles,...
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
It occurred to me that I had a fine brain in beautiful working order and that I might as well use it.
It is nothing but a kind of microcosmos of communism—all that psychiatry,' rumbled Pnin, in his answer to Chateau. 'Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thi...
In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes […], sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose- and that not owning to some blessed pill or potion […] or at least without our...
In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.
If onlyit were possible to juicily belch up the lifeone's lived, chew it anew and gulp it down,and then once more to roll it with a fat,ox-like tongue, to squeeze from its eternaldregs the former swee...