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.
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed toward me like towers of Pisa.
I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.
of which enough has been said
before such a vastness and variety of vistas, I was as helpless as Adam at the preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard.
Their shadows were giants.
"I have a surprise for you," she said looking at me with fond eyes over a spoonful of soup. "In the fall we two are going to England."
I swallowed my spoonful, wiped my lips with pink paper (Oh, the cool rich linens of Mirana Hotel!) and said: "I have also a surprise for you, my dear. We two are not going to England."
She said I was her ruler and her god. She said Louise had gone, and let us make love right away. She said I must forgive her or she would die.
I had put the radio at full blast. I had blazed in her face an olisbos-like flashlight. I had pushed her, pinched her, prodded her--and nothing had disturbed the rhythm of her calm and powerful breathing. However, when I had done such a simple thing as kiss her, she had awakened at once, as fresh and strong as an octopus (I barely escaped). This would not do, I thought; had to get something still safer. At first, Dr. Byron did not seem to believe me when I said his last prescription was no match for my insomnia.
“a banked banker” nice one man
Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime. Otherwise, deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose, the skeleton of her day sagged and collapsed. The object in view might be anything--a lighthouse in Virginia, a natural cave in Arkansas converted to a cafè, a collection of guns and violins somewhere in Oklahoma, a replica of the Grotto of Lourdes in Louisiana, shabby photographs of the bonanza mining period in the local museum of a Rocky Mountains resort, anything whatsoever--but it had to be there, in front of us, like a fixed star, although as likely as not Lo would feign gagging as soon as we got to it.
I would stare at the honest brightness of the gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks, or at a distant hill scrambling out--scarred but still untamed--from the wilderness of agriculture that was trying to swallow it.
What on earth can Dorothy Hummerson care for Greece and the Orient with their harems and slaves?"
because what I feared most was not that she might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away
A little dreamy. Has private jokes of her own, transposing for instance the first letters of some of her teachers names.
He did not use a fountain pen which fact, as any psychoanalyst will tell you, meant that the patient was a repressed undinist. One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx.
“I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.”
I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth.
“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.