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I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.

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Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

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No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do no...more

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Good by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this.

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For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, ...more

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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" pebble...more

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It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

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We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events...more

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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...more

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

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They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swis...more

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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 t...more

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My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing...more

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I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No ma...more

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I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.