Humbert Humbert: You know, I've missed you terribly. Lolita Haze: I haven't missed you. In fact, I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you. Humbert Humbert: Oh? Lolita Haze: But it doesn't matter a bit,...
A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an inti...
Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
The satisfaction of a special Pninian craving.
We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things.
I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.
You have to be an artist and a madman...
It's exactly my sense of existing - a fragment, a wisp of color.
All of which does not alter the fact that Pnin was on the wrong train.
Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
The cup-sized breasts of that twenty-four year old impatient beauty seemed a dozen years younger than she, with those pale squinty nipples and firm form.
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....
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...
И вот, то, что я давно подозревал, - бессмысленность мира, - стало мне очевидно. Я почувствовал вдруг невероятную свободу, - вот она-то и была знаком бессмысленности.
Words without experience are meaningless.
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it fo...
There are few physiques I loathe more than the heavy low-slung pelvis, thick calves and deplorable complexion of the average coed (in whom I see, maybe, the coffin of coarse female flesh within which...
The square root of I is I.
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 felt my life needed a shake-up.