Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful w...
But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until...
But how can I begin writing when I do not know whether I shall have time enough, and the torture comes when you say to yourself, ‘Yesterday there would have been enough time’—and again you think, ‘If...
And Schyogolev launched on a discussion of politics. Like many unpaid windbags he thought that he could combine the reports he read in the papers by paid windbags into an orderly scheme, upon followin...
And I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.
Although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.
All the information I have about myself is from forged documents.
All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanour, start snoring, amaze...
A jövő azonban mit sem törődik érzéseinkkel és fantáziálásunkkal. A jövő minden pillanatban a szétágazó lehetőségek végtelenje.
10 / : Both nouns belong to the vaguely evocative type of romantic locution so frequent in and so difficult to render by exact English words. ranges from mollitude (Fr. ) , i.e., soft luxuriance, d...
Under no circumstances would he [Humbert Humbert] have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row.
Hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)...
– Az ember úgy érzi… Úgy érzi… – mondta –, hogy csupán valami szerepet játszik, és elfelejtette a következő mondatait.
[T]his is how it will remain until ... literary criticism discards its sociological, religious, philosophical and other textbooks, which only help mediocrity to admire itself. Only then will you be fr...
You see, we find comfort in telling ourselves that the world could not exist without us, that it exists only inasmuch as we ourselves exist, inasmuch as we can represent it to ourselves. Death, infini...
You came into my life-not as one comes to visit (you know, not taking one’s hat off) but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your s...
Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissan...
Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?
When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowin...
Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.