It's exactly my sense of existing - a fragment, a wisp of color.
It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the a of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the o- fi...
I appeal to parents: never, never say, Hurry up, to a child. (62)
A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps...
Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being -- not a constant state -- that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations....
If I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man's logic and no man's ecstatic fits may force me to find less silly my impossibly silly position: that of God's slave; no, not his...
Cynthia had been on friendly terms with an eccentric librarian called Porlock who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the subst...
And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:...Beneath the skyOf my America to sighFor one locality in Russia.(a passage not for 'general readers' but for 'idiots')
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...
И вот, то, что я давно подозревал, - бессмысленность мира, - стало мне очевидно. Я почувствовал вдруг невероятную свободу, - вот она-то и была знаком бессмысленности.
The lost glove is happy.
The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a p...
The distinct feature of everything extant is its monotony.
Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, ph...
I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that pas...
For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is L. The suffix -ita has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita....
Do all people have that? A face, a phrase, a landscape, an air bubble from the past suddenly floating up as if released by the head warden's child from a cell in the brain while the mind is at work on...
Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the firs...
And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale ol...