Quotes - Page 350 | Just Great DataBase

I lie flat, the damp air above me like a lid. Like earth. I wish it would rain. Better still, a thunderstorm, black clouds, lightning, ear-splitting sound.

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

I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.   I

Without a word she swivels, as if she’s voice activated, as if she’s on little oiled wheels, as if she’s on top of a music box. I resent this grace of hers. I resent her meek head, bowed as if into a heavy wind. But there is no wind.

Since Cervantes’s magnificent Knight’s quest has cosmological scope and reverberation, no object seems beyond reach.

If you can call it talking, these clipped whispers, projected through the funnels of our white wings. It’s more like a telegram, a verbal semaphore. Amputated speech.

The thing is, most of the time when you're coming pretty close to doing it with a girl – a girl that isn't a prostitute or anything, I mean – she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don't. I can't help it. You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they're just scared as hell, or whether they're just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame'll be on you not them. Anyway, I keep stopping. The trouble is, I get to feeling sorry for them. I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while, you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains. I don't know. They tell me to stop, so I stop. I always wish I hadn't, after I take them home, but I keep doing it anyway.

He was not a monster, to her ... How easy to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.

But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman.

V: After having sucked all the good out of him you duck him away like a... like a banana skin.

There is one thing I’d like to know, though,’ says Albert, ‘and that’s whether there would still have been a war if the Kaiser had said no.’ ‘I’m sure there would,’ I put in. ‘After all, they say that he didn’t want to fight at all at the beginning.’ ‘Well, if not just him, then perhaps if, let’s say twenty or thirty people in the world had said no?’ ‘Maybe not then,’ I admit. ‘But they all did want a war.

He continued, slowly, by a process of osmosis and white knowledge (which is like white noise, only more useful), to comprehend the city, a process that accelerated when he realized that the actual City of London itself was no bigger than a square mile.

How is it possible that things so trivial and so easy to remedy can have the power to perplex and absorb an intelligence as mature as yours, and one so ready to demolish and pass over much greater difficulties?

I have always heard it said, Sancho, that to do good to boors is to throw water into the sea.

There are more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of by your philosophy.

Listen. The more men you’ve had, the more I love you. Do you understand that? I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.

I say to the dead man, but I say it calmly, to-day you, to-morrow me. But if I come out of it, comrade, I will fight against this, that has struck us both down; from you, taken life—and from me—? Life also. I promise you, comrade. It shall never happen again.

...the very old men [...] believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.