Lolita Quotes - Page 2 | Just Great DataBase

In my self-made seraglio, I was a radiant and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves.

I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.

You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy... in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs... the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

[...] and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.

I was proceeding slowly one afternoon through torrents of rain and kept seeing that red ghost swimming and shivering with lust in my mirror, when presently the deluge dwindled to a patter, and then was suspended altogether.

Somber Yellowstone Park and its colored hot springs, baby geysers, rainbows of bubbling mud - symbols of my passion.

Because you took advantage of a sinnerBecause you took advantageBecause you tookbecause you took advantage of my disadvantage

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way—even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications.

Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.

Looking down at her fingernails, she also asked me had I not in my family a certain strange strain. I countered by inquiring whether she would still want to marry me if my father’s maternal grandfather had been, say, a Turk.

Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m’imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. Monsieur Poe-poe, as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert’s classes in Paris called the poet-poet.

For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, "pinging" pebbles at an empty can.

No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He

I notice I may have somehow mixed up two events, my visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Cantrip, and our passing through Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection.

I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

I found Dolores Haze at the kitchen table, consuming a wedge of pie, with her eyes fixed on her script. They rose to meet mine with a kind of celestial vapidity.

You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy,... in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs,...the little deadly demon...; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.

My mouth to him was a splendid cave full of priceless treasures, but I denied him entrance.

By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane.

was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.

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. She

Reader! Bruder! 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 tenth or twentieth soldier in the raping queue who throws the girl's black shawl over her white face so as not to see those impossible eyes while taking his military pleasure in the sad, sacked village.

It was then that I sprang my surprise. Oh, what a dreamy pet! She walked up to the open suitcase as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peering at that distant treasure box on the luggage support. (Was there something wrong, I wondered, with those great gray eyes of hers, or were we both plunged in the same enchanted mist?) She stepped up to it, lifting her rather high-heeled feet rather high, and bending her beautiful boy-knees while she walked through dilating space with the lentor of one walking under water or in a flight dream.

The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale's white church tower when I looked around me for the last time.

She groped for words. I supplied them mentally ('He broke my heart. You merely broke my life').

the red sun of desire and decision (the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher,

Because you took advantage of a sinner because you took advantage because you took because you took advantage of my disadvantage …

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car.

I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around.

the artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman.

... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

I almost said—trying to find some casual remark—'I wonder sometimes what has become of the little McCoo girl, did she ever get better?'—but stopped in time lest she rejoin: 'I wonder sometimes what has become of the little Haze girl . . .

Blue!’ she exclaimed. ‘Violet blue. What are they made of?’ ‘Summer skies,’ I said, ‘and plums and figs, and the grape-blood of emperors.’ ‘No,

Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards – presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own.

Solitude was corrupting me...My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.

I had possessed her - and she never knew it.

I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze.

Great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries.

The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave', as a poet might have said. But I am not poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.

You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up. You must persevere.

Humbert the Terrible deliberated with Humbert the Small whether Humbert Humbert should kill her or her lover, or both, or neither.

You who conceal your strongest feelings must think me a shameless little idiot for throwing open my poor bruised heart like this.

I felt that way not because I never once discovered any palpable hard young throat to crush among the masculine mutes that flickered somewhere in the background; but because it was to me "overwhelmingly obvious" (a favorite expression with my aunt Sybil) that all varieties of high school boys - from the perspiring nincompoop whom "holding hands" thrills, to the self-sufficient rapist with pustules and a souped-up car - equally bored my sophisticated young mistress.

My habit of being silent when displeased, or, more exactly, the cold and scaly quality of my displeased silence, used to frighten Valeria out of her wits. She used to whimper and wail, saying ‘Ce qui me rend folle, c’est que je ne sais à quoi tu penses quand tu es comme ça.’ I tried being silent with Charlotte – and she just chirped on, or chucked my silence under the chin. An astonishing woman!

...there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it...

I simply love that tinge of Botticellian pink, that raw rose about the lips, those wet, matted eyelashes…

Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me.

I have nothing but very sad associations with the Old and rotting World. No colored ads in your magazines will change the situation.’ ‘My

In its published form, this book is being read, I assume, in the first years of 2000 A.D. (1935 plus eighty or ninety, live long, my love)...