Quotes – Page 347 | Just Great DataBase

Here lies our comrade, Kemmerich, who a little while ago was roasting horse flesh with us and squatting in the shell-holes. He it is still and yet it is not he any longer. His features have become uncertain and faint, like a photographic plate from which two pictures have been taken. Even his voice sounds like ashes.

Blessed be those that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”Nobody said when.

One last word,’ I said in my horrible careful English, ‘are you quite, quite sure that—well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but—well—some day, any day, you will not come to live with me? I will create a brand new God and thank him with piercing cries, if you give me that microscopic hope”No,’ she said smiling, ‘no.”It would have made all the difference,’ said Humbert Humbert.Then I pulled out my automatic-I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it.

She had a beautiful perfume and lit up my life. I should never have run away from her. I should have guessed at the tenderness beneath her pathetic strategies. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her…

I want to know what passion is,” she heard him saying. “I want to feel something strongly.

He was reluctant to open it, for once such a thing is opened, it cannot be shut again.

You give me a royal pain in the ass if you want to know the truth.

It is by rugged paths like these they go That scale the heights of immortality, Unreached by those that falter here below.

So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naively lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.

And there is so much time to be endured, time heavy as fried food or thick fog; and then all at once these red events, like explosions, on streets otherwise decorous and matronly and somnambulent.I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.I’ve tried to put some of the good things in as well. Flowers, for instance, because where would we be without them?

Occasionally I try to put myself in his position. I do this as a tactic, to guess in advance how he may be moved to behave towards me. It’s difficult for me to believe I have power over him, of any sort, but I do; although it’s of an equivocal kind. Once in a while I think I can see myself, though blurrily, as he may see me. There are things he wants to prove to me, gifts he wants to bestow, services he wants to render, tendernesses he wants to inspire.

And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower.

We don’t act like that because we are in good humor; we are in a good humor because otherwise we should go to pieces.

Maybe the life I think I’m living is a paranoid delusion.

…in the worst of circumstances, the hypocrite who pretends to be good does less harm than the public sinner.

With your little claws, Lolita.

Their youth is touching, but I know I can’t be deceived by it. The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven’t yet learned about existence through time. You have to go slowly with them.

When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.

I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself. I can’t make it more clear; it’s only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces on the edges of print.