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We Live Not Only In A World Of Thoughts, But Also In A World Of Things. Words Without Experience Are Meaningless.

-Vladimir Nabokov

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We Live Not Only

Vladimir Nabokov

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We Live Not Only In A World Of Thoughts, But Also In A World Of Things. Words Without Experience Are Meaningless.

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Old Birds Like Orlovius Are Wonderfully Easy To Lead By The Beak, Because A Combination Of Decency And Sentimentality Is Exactly Equal To Being A Fool.

A Person Hoping To Become A Poet Must Have The Capacity Of Thinking Of Several Things At A Time.

Once Upon A Time There Lived In Berlin, Germany, A Man Called Albinus. He Was Rich, Respectable, Happy; One Day He Abandoned His Wife For The Sake Of A Youthful Mistress; He Loved; Was Not Loved; And His Life Ended In Disaster. This Is The Whole Of The Story And We Might Have Left It At That Had There Not Been Profit And Pleasure In The Telling; And Although There Is Plenty Of Space On A Gravestone To Contain, Bound In Moss, The Abridged Version Of A Man's Life, Detail Is Always Welcome.

Happy Is The Novelist Who Manages To Preserve An Actual Love Letter That He Received When He Was Young Within A Work Of Fiction, Embedded In It Like A Clean Bullet In Flabby Flesh And Quite Secure There, Among Spurious Lives.

I Have Often Noticed That After I Had Bestowed On The Characters Of My Novels Some Treasured Item Of My Past, It Would Pine Away In The Artificial World Where I Had So Abruptly Placed It.

Words Without Experience Are Meaningless.

Dostoevky's Lack Of Taste, His Monotonous Dealings With Persons Suffering With Pre-freudian Complexes, The Way He Has Of Wallowing In The Tragic Misadventures Of Human Dignity - All This Is Difficult To Admire.

My Own Ultraviolet Darling. " Lolita

A Novelist Is, Like All Mortals, More Fully At Home On The Surface Of The Present Than In The Ooze Of The Past.

In And Out Of My Heart Flowed My Rainbow Blood.

I Grew, A Happy, Healthy Child In A Bright World Of Illustrated Books, Clean Sand, Orange Trees, Friendly Dogs, Sea Vistas And Smiling Faces.

I Am Sufficiently Proud Of My Knowing Something To Be Modest About My Not Knowing All.

His Wings Were Failing, But He Refused To Fall Without A Struggle.

Whenever I Start Thinking Of My Love For A Person, I Am In The Habit Of Immediately Drawing Radii From My Love - From My Heart, From The Tender Nucleus Of A Personal Matter- To Monstrously Remote Points Of The Universe. Something Impels Me To Measure The Consciousness Of My Love Against Such Unimaginable And Incalculable Things As The Behaviour Of Nebulae (whose Very Remoteness Seems A Form Of Insanity), The Dreadful Pitfalls Of Eternity, The Unknowledgeable Beyond The Unknown, The Helplessness, The Cold, The Sickening Involutions And Interpenetrations Of Space And Time.

I Think Like A Genius, I Write Like A Distinguished Author, And I Speak Like A Child.

My Answer To Your Question'does The Writer Have A Social Responsibility?' Is No.you Owe Me Ten Cents, Sir.

The Lost Glove Is Happy.

Remembrance, Like Rembrandt, Is Dark But Festive. Remembered Ones Dress Up For The Occasion And Sit Still. Memory Is A Photo-studio De Luxe On An Infinite Fifth Power Avenue.

You Know, What's So Dreadful About Dying Is That You Are Completely On Your Own.

Beauty Plus Pity -- That Is The Closest We Can Get To A Definition Of Art.

There Are Teachers And Students With Square Minds Who Are By Nature Meant To Undergo The Fascination Of Catagories. For Them, 'schools' And 'movements' Are Everything; By Painting A Group Symbol On The Brow Of Mediocrity, They Condone Their Own Incomprehension Of True Genius.

To Play Safe, I Prefer To Accept Only One Type Of Power: The Power Of Art Over Trash, The Triumph Of Magic Over The Brute.

Poetry Involves The Mysteries Of The Irrational Perceived Through Rational Words.

A Work Of Art Has No Importance Whatever To Society. It Is Only Important To The Individual, And Only The Individual Reader Is Important To Me. I Don't Give A Damn For The Group, The Community, The Masses, And So Forth.

Genius Is An African Who Dreams Up Snow.

You Can Always Count On A Murderer For A Fancy Prose Style.

…she Was, Obviously, One Of Those Women Whose Polished Words May Reflect A Book Club Or Bridge Club, Or Any Other Deadly Conventionality, But Never Her Soul.

Usually I Read Several Books At A Time - Old Books, New Books, Fiction, Nonfiction, Verse, Anything - And When The Bedside Heap Of A Dozen Volumes Or So Has Dwindled To Two Or Three, Which Generally Happens By The End Of One Week, I Accumulate Another Pile.

Toska - Noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian Word Roughly Translated As Sadness, Melancholia, Lugubriousness. "no Single Word In English Renders All The Shades Of Toska. At Its Deepest And Most Painful, It Is A Sensation Of Great Spiritual Anguish, Often Without Any Specific Cause. At Less Morbid Levels It Is A Dull Ache Of The Soul, A Longing With Nothing To Long For, A Sick Pining, A Vague Restlessness, Mental Throes, Yearning. In Particular Cases It May Be The Desire For Somebody Of Something Specific, Nostalgia, Love-sickness. At The Lowest Level It Grades Into Ennui, Boredom.

Ideas In Modern Russia Are Machine-cut Blocks Coming In Solid Colors; The Nuance Is Outlawed, The Interval Walled Up, The Curve Grossly Stepped.

Imagination Without Knowledge Leads No Farther Than The Back Yard Of Primitive Art, The Child's Scrawl On The Fence, And The Crank's Message In The Market Place. Art Is Never Simple.

Literature Is Invention. Fiction Is Fiction. To Call A Story A True Story Is An Insult To Both Art And Truth.

Humbert Was Perfectly Capable Of Intercourse With Eve, But It Was Lilith He Longed For.

A Good Laugh Is The Best Pesticide.

How Small The Cosmos (a Kangaroo's Pouch Would Hold It), How Paltry And Puny In Comparison To Human Consciousness, To A Single Individual Recollection, And Its Expression In Words!

Only One Letter Divides The Comic From The Cosmic.

I See Nothing For The Treatment Of My Misery But The Melancholy And Very Local Palliative Of Articulate Art.

The Cradle Rocks Above An Abyss, And Common Sense Tells Us That Our Existence Is But A Brief Crack Of Light Between Two Eternities Of Darkness.

I Think She Always Nursed A Small Mad Hope.

Existence Is A Series Of Footnotes To A Vast, Obscure, Unfinished Masterpiece.

No Writer In A Free Country Should Be Expected To Bother About The Exact Demarcation Between The Sensuous And The Sensual; This Is Preposterous; I Can Only Admire But Cannot Emulate The Accuracy Of Judgment Of Those Who Pose The Fair Young Mammals Photographed In Magazines Where The General Neckline Is Just Low Enough To Provoke A Past Master's Chuckle And Just High Enough Not To Make A Postmaster Frown.

Between The Wolf In The Tall Grass And The Wolf In The Tall Story There Is A Shimmering Go-between. That Go-between, That Prism, Is The Art Of Literature.

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 Of Specific Significance For Us: Here Shall John Always Stumble; There Shall Jane's Heart Always Break.

And She Was Mine, She Was Mine, The Key Was In My Fist, My Fist Was In My Pocket, She Was Mine.

Mnemosyne, One Must Admit, Has Shown Herself To Be A Very Careless Girl.

A Man Who Has Decided Upon Self-destruction Is Far Removed From Mundane Affairs, And To Sit Down And Write His Will Would Be, At That Moment, An Act Just As Absurd As Winding Up One’s Watch, Since Together With The Man, The Whole World Is Destroyed; The Last Letter Is Instantly Reduced To Dust And, With It, All The Postmen; And Like Smoke, Vanishes The Estate Bequeathed To A Nonexistent Progeny.

Although I Could Never Get Used To The Constant State Of Anxiety In Which The Guilty, The Great, And The Tenderhearted Live, I Felt I Was Doing My Best In The Way Of Mimicry.

It Is Strange How A Memory Will Grow Into A Wax Figure, How The Cherub Grows Suspiciously Prettier As Its Frame Darkens With Age-strange, Strange Are The Mishaps Of Memory.

... My Mind Lay Limp In An Empty World.

I Need You, The Reader, To Imagine Us, For We Don't Really Exist If You Don't.

...and The Red Sun Of Desire And Decision (the Two Things That Create A Live World) Rose Higher And Higher, While Upon A Succession Of Balconies A Succession Of Libertines, Sparkling Glass In Hand, Toasted The Bliss Of Past And Future Nights.

No Author Has Created With Less Emphasis Such Pathetic Characters As Chekhov Has.

The More Gifted And Talkative One's Characters Are, The Greater The Chances Of Their Resembling The Author In Tone Or Tint Of Mind.

Don't Touch Me; I'll Die If You Touch Me.

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.

Age Indomitably, In The European Manner. Do Not Finish Your Labours Young. Be A Planet, Not A Meteor. Honor The Working Day. Sit At Your Desk.

Our Imagination Flies -- We Are Its Shadow On The Earth.

The Compensation For A Death Sentence Is The Knowledge Of The Exact Hour When One Is To Die. A Great Luxury, But One That Is Well Earned.

Loneliness As A Situation Can Be Corrected, But As A State Of Mind It Is An Incurable Illness.

Which Arrow Flies For Ever? The Arrow That Has Hit Its Mark.

Genius Still Means To Me, In My Russian Fastidiousness And Pride Of Phrase, A Unique Dazzling Gift. The Gift Of James Joyce, And Not The Talent Of Henry James.

The Square Root Of I Is I.

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. She Was Only The Dead-leaf Echo Of The Nymphet From Long Ago - But I Loved Her, This Lolita, Pale And Polluted And Big With Another Man's Child. She Could Fade And Wither - I Didn't Care. I Would Still Go Mad With Tenderness At The Mere Sight Of Her Face.

But As Van Casually Directed The Searchlight Of Backthought Into That Maze Of The Past Where The Mirror-lined Narrow Paths Not Only Took Different Turns, But Used Different Levels (as A Mule-drawn Cart Passes Under The Arch Of A Viaduct Along Which A Motor Skims By), He Found Himself Tackling, In Still Vague And Idle Fashion, The Science That Was To Obsess His Mature Years - Problems Of Space And Time, Space Versus Time, Time-twisted Space, Space As Time, Time As Space - And Space Breaking Away From Time, In The Final Tragic Triumph Of Human Cogitation: I Am Because I Die.

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.

Genius Is Finding The Invisible Link Between Things.

All Religions Are Based On Obsolete Terminology.

I Knew I Had Fallen In Love With Lolita Forever; But I Also Knew She Would Not Be Forever Lolita.

Who Can Say What Heartbreaks Are Caused In A Dog By Our Discontinuing A Romp?

I Think It Is All A Matter Of Love.

My Little Cup Brims With Tiddles.

Imagination, The Supreme Delight Of The Immortal And The Immature, Should Be Limited. In Order To Enjoy Life, We Should Not Enjoy It Too Much.

The Road Now Stretched Across Open Country, And It Occured To Me - Not By Way Of Protest, Not As A Symbol, Or Anything Like That, But Merely As A Novel Experience - That Since I Had Disregarded All Laws Of Humanity, I Might As Well Disregard The Rules Of Traffic. So I Crossed To The Left Side Of The Highway And Checked The Feeling, And The Feeling Was Good. It Was A Pleasant Diaphragmal Melting, With Elements Of Diffused Tactility, All This Enhanced By The Thought That Nothing Could Be Nearer To The Elimination Of Basic Physical Laws Than Deliberately Driving On The Wrong Site Of The Road.

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 Of Her Subsists Within The Hollows And Dells Of Memory, Over Which, If You Can Still Stand My Style (i Am Writing Under Observation), The Sun Of My Infancy Had Set: Surely, You All Know Those Redolent Remnants Of Day Suspended, With The Midges, About Some Hedge In Bloom Or Suddenly Entered And Traversed By The Rambler, At The Bottom Of A Hill, In The Summer Dusk; A Furry Warmth, Golden Midges.

Her Lips Were Like Large Crimson Polyps.

A Thousand Years Ago Five Minutes Were Equal To Forty Ounces Of Fine Sand. Outstare The Stars. Infinite Foretime And Infinite Aftertime: Above Your Head They Close Like Giant Wings, And You Are Dead.

I Hope You Will Love Your Baby. I Hope It Will Be A Boy. That Husband Of Yours, I Hope, Will Always Treat You Well, Because Otherwise My Specter Shall Come Out Of Him, Like Black Smoke, Like A Demented Giant, And Pull Him Apart Nerve By Nerve. ... 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.

If Possible, Be Russian. And Live In Another Country. Play Chess. Be An Active Trader Between Languages. Carry Precious Metals From One To The Other. Remind Us Of Stravinsky. Know The Names Of Plants And Flying Creatures. Hunt Gauzy Wings With Snares Of Gauze. Make Science Pay Tribute. Have A Butterfly Known By Your Name.

The Rich Philistinism Emanating From Advertisements Is Due Not To Their Exaggerating (or Inventing) The Glory Of This Or That Serviceable Article But To Suggesting That The Acme Of Human Happiness Is Purchasable And That Its Purchase Somehow Ennobles The Purchaser.

I Still Dwelled Deep In My Elected Paradise--a Paradise Whose Skies Were The Color Of Hell-flames--but Still A Paradise.

For Better Or Worse, It Is The Commentator Who Has The Last Word.

I Do Not Begin My Novel At The Beginning, I Do Not Reach Chapter Three Before I Reach Chapter Four, I Do Not Go Dutifully From One Page To The Next, In Consecutive Order; No, I Pick Out A Bit Here And A Bit There, Till I Have Filled All The Gaps On Paper. This Is Why I Like Writing My Stories And Novels On Index Cards, Numbering Them Later When The Whole Set Is Complete. Every Card Is Rewritten Many Times.

I Mean, I Have The Feeling That Something In My Mind Is Poisoning Everything Else.

In A Sense, All Poetry Is Positional: To Try To Express One's Position In Regard To The Universe Embraced By Consciousness, Is An Immemorial Urge. The Arms Of Consciousness Reach Out And Grope, And The Longer They Are The Better. Tentacles, Not Wings, Are Apollo's Natural Members.

Perhaps If The Year Was 1447 Instead Of 1947 I Might Have Hoodwinked My Gentle Nature By Administering Her Some Classical Poison From A Hollow Agate, Some Tender Philter Of Death. But In Our Middle-class Nosy Era It Would Not Have Come Off The Way It Used To In The Brocaded Palaces Of The Past. Nowadays You Have To Be A Scientist If You Want To Be A Killer.

I Do Not See Any Essential Difference Between Abstract And Primitive Art. Both Are Simple And Sincere. Naturally, We Should Not Generalize In These Matters: It Is The Individual Artist That Counts.

Between The Age Limits Of Nine And Fourteen There Occur Maidens Who, To Certain Bewitched Travelers, Twice Or Many Times Older Than They, Reveal Their True Nature Which Is Not Human, But Nymphic (that Is, Demoniac); And These Chosen Creatures I Propose To Designate As Nymphets.

Measure Me While I Live - After It Will Be Too Late.

And This Is The Only Immortality You And I May Share, My Lolita.

She Had Spent All Her Life In Feeling Miserable; This Misery Was Her Native Element; Its Fluctuations, Its Varying Depths, Alone Save Her The Impression Of Moving And Living. What Bothers Me Is That A Sense Of Misery, And Nothing Else, Is Not Enough To Make A Permanent Soul. My Enormous And Morose Mademoiselle Is All Right On Earth But Impossible In Eternity.

I Could Isolate, Consciously, Little. Everything Seemed Blurred, Yellow-clouded, Yielding Nothing Tangible. Her Inept Acrostics, Maudlin Evasions, Theopathies - Every Recollection Formed Ripples Of Mysterious Meaning. Everything Seemed Yellowly Blurred, Illusive, Lost.

The Writer's Job Is To Get The Main Character Up A Tree, And Then Once They Are Up There, Throw Rocks At Them.

Why Do Those People Guess So Much And Shave So Little, And Are So Disdainful Of Hearing Aids?

Dear Jesus, Do Something.

Readers Are Not Sheep, And Not Every Pen Tempts Them.

Solitude Was Corrupting Me.

My Loathings Are Simple: Stupidity, Oppression, Crime, Cruelty, Soft Music.

Poor Knight! He Really Had Two Periods, The Firsta Dull Man Writing Broken English, The Seconda Broken Man Writing Dull English.

Maybe The Only Thing That Hints At A Sense Of Time Is Rhythm; Not The Recurrent Beats Of The Rhythm But The Gap Between Two Such Beats, The Gray Gap Between Black Beats: The Tender Interval.

To Begin With, Let Us Take The Following Motto...literature Is Love. Now We Can Continue.

After The First Shock Of Recognition - A Sudden Sense Of "this Is What I'm Going To Write" - The Novel Starts To Breed By Itself; The Process Goes On Solely In The Mind, Not On Paper. I Feel A Kind Of Gentle Development, An Uncurling Inside, And I Know That The Details Are There Already, That In Fact I Would See Them Plainly If I Looked Closer, But I Prefer To Wait Until What Is Loosely Called Inspiration Has Completed The Task For Me.

Perhaps, Somewhere, Some Day, At A Less Miserable Time, We May See Each Other Again.

Most Of The Dandelions Had Changed From Suns To Moons.

I Don't Read Reviews About Myself With Any Special Eagerness Or Attention Unless They Are Masterpieces Of Wit And Acumen, And I Never Reread Them.

All My Stories Are Webs Of Style And None Seems At First Blush To Contain Much Kinetic Matter.

Mind You, Sometimes The Angels Smoke, Hiding It With Their Sleeves, And When The Archangel Comes, They Throw The Cigarettes Away: That’s When You Get Shooting Stars.

Resemblances Are The Shadows Of Differences. Different People See Different Similarities And Similar Differences.

The Tiny Madman In His Padded Cell.

In Reading, One Should Notice And Fondle Details.

My Mind Speaks English, My Heart Speaks Russian, And My Ear Prefers French.

Lolita, Light Of My Life, Fire Of My Loins. My Sin, My Soul.

When I Receive A New Novel From A Hopeful Publisher - "hoping That I Like The Book As Much As He Does" - I Check First Of All How Much Dialog There Is, And If It Looks Too Abundant Or Too Sustained, I Shut The Book With A Bang.

Do Not Be Angry With The Rain; It Simply Does Not Know How To Fall Upwards.

You See, She Had Absolutely Nowhere Else To Go.

Look At This Tangle Of Thorns.

I Was Also Supposed To Quiz My Various Companions On A Number Of Important Matters Such As Nostalgia, Fear Of Unknown Animals, Food Fantasies, Nocturnal Emissions, Hobbies, Choice Of Radio Program, Changes In Out Look And So Forth.

My Only Grudge Against Nature Was That I Could Not Turn My Lolita Inside Out And Apply Voracious Lips To Her Young Matrix, Her Unknown Heart, Her Nacreous Liver, The Sea-grapes Of Her Lungs, Her Comely Twin Kidneys.

Down You Go, But All The While You Feel Suspended And Buoyed As You Somersault In Slow Motion Like A Somnolent Tumbler Pigeon, And Sprawl Supine On The Eiderdown Of The Air, Or Lazily Turn To Embrace Your Pillow, Enjoying Every Last Instant Of Soft, Deep, Death-padded Life, With The Earth's Green See-saw Now Above, Now Below, And The Voluptuous Crucifixion, As You Stretch Yourself In The Growing Rush, In The Nearing Swish, And Then Your Loved Body's Obliteration In The Lap Of The Lord.

Direct Interference In A Person's Life Does Not Enter Our Scope Of Activity, Nor, On The Other, Tralatitiously Speaking, Hand, Is His Destiny A Chain Of Predeterminate Links: Some 'future' Events May Be Linked To Others, O.k., But All Are Chimeric, And Every Cause-and-effect Sequence Is Always A Hit-and-miss Affair, Even If The Lunette Has Actually Closed Around Your Neck, And The Cretinous Crowd Holds Its Breath.

Nymphets Do Not Occur In Polar Regions.

I Have No Ear For Music. When I Attend A Concert, I Endeavor Gamely To Follow The Sequence And Relationship Of Sounds But Cannot Keep It Up For More Than A Few Minutes. Visual Impressions, Reflections Of Hands In Lacquered Wood, A Diligent Bald Spot Over A Fiddle, Take Over, And Soon I Am Bored Beyond Measure By The Motions Of The Musicians.

Whatever His Secret Was, I Have Learnt One Secret Too, And Namely: That The Soul Is But A Manner Of Being - Not A Constant State - That Any Soul May Be Yours, If You Find And Follow Its Undulations. The Hereafter May Be The Full Ability Of Consciously Living In Any Chosen Soul, In Any Number Of Souls, All Of Them Unconscious Of Their Interchangeable Burden.

Don't Cry, I'm Sorry To Have Deceived You So Much, But That's How Life Is.

Ada Girl, Adored Girl, [...] I'm A Radiant Void. I'm Convalescing After A Long And Dreadful Illness. You Cried Over My Unseemly Scar, But Now Life Is Going To Be Nothing But Love And Laughter, And Corn In Cans. I Cannot Brood Over Broken Hearts, Mine Is Too Recently Mended.

The Evolution Of Sense Is, In A Sense, The Evolution Of Nonsense.

Here Lies The Sense Of Literary Creation To Portray Ordinary Objects As They Will Be Reflected In Kindly Mirrors Of Future Times. . . . To Find In Objects Around Us The Fragrant Tenderness That Only Posterity Will Discern . . .

...for The Human Brain Can Become The Best Torture House Of All Those It Has Invented, Established And Used In A Millions Of Years, In Millions Of Lands, On Millions Of Howling Creatures.

Let All Of Life Be An Unfettered Howl. Like The Crowd Greeting The Gladiator. Don't Stop To Think, Don't Interrupt The Scream, Exhale, Release Life's Rapture.

All The Seven Deadly Sins Are Peccadilloes But Without Three Of Them, Pride, Lust, And Sloth, Poetry Might Never Have Been Born.

Our Best Yesterdays Are Now Foul Piles Of Crumpled Names.

The Thought, When Written Down, Becomes Less Oppressive, But Some Thoughts Are Like A Cancerous Tumor: You Express Is, You Excise It, And It Grows Back Worse Than Before.

If He Failed The First Time He Took His Driver's Licence Test, It Was Mainly Because He Started An Argument With The Examiner In An Ill-timed Effort To Prove That Nothing Could Be More Humiliating To A Rational Creature Than Being Required To Encourage The Development Of A Base Conditional Reflex By Stopping At A Red Light When There Was Not An Earthly Soul Around, Heeled Or Wheeled. He Was More Circumspect The Next Time, And Passed.

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.

Dark Pictures, Thrones, The Stones That Pilgrims Kiss Poems That Take A Thousand Years To Die But Ape The Immortality Of This Red Label On A Little Butterfly .

The Clumsiest Literal Translation Is A Thousand Times More Useful Than The Prettiest Paraphrase.

Revelation Can Be More Perilous Than Revolution.

I Think My Favorite Fact About Myself Is That I Have Never Been Dismayed By A Critic's Bilge Or Bile, And Have Never Once In My Life Asked Or Thanked A Reviewer For A Review.

Life Is Short. From Here To That Old Car You Know So Well There Is A Stretch Of Twenty, Twenty-five Paces. It Is A Very Short Walk. Make Those Twenty-five Steps. Now. Right Now. Come Just As You Are. And We Shall Live Happily Ever After.

I Always Call Him Lewis Carroll Carroll, Because He Was The First Humbert Humbert.

If I Correctly Understand The Sense Of This Succinct Observation, Our Poet Suggests Here That Human Life Is But A Series Of Footnotes To A Vast Obscure Unfinished Masterpiece.

There Are Two Kinds Of Visual Memory: One When You Skillfully Recreate An Image In The Laboratory Of Your Mind, With Your Eyes Open (and Then I See Annabel In Such General Terms As: "honey-colored Skin," "thin Arms," "brown Bobbed Hair," "long Lashes," "big Bright Mouth"); And The Other When You Instantly Evoke, With Shut Eyes, On The Dark Innerside Of Your Eyelids, The Objective, Absolutely Optical Replica Of A Beloved Face, A Little Ghost In Natural Colors (and This Is How I See Lolita).

I Could Also Distinguish The Glint Of A Special Puddle (the One Krug Had Somehow Perceived Through The Layer Of His Own Life), An Oblong Puddle Invariably Acquiring The Same Form After Every Shower Because Of The Constant Spatulate Shape Of A Depression In The Ground. Possibly Something Of The Kind May Be Said To Occur In Regard To The Imprint We Leave In The Intimate Texture Of Space. Twang. A Good Night For Nothing.

Nostalgia In Reverse, The Longing For Yet Another Strange Land, Grew Especially Strong In Spring.

It Was Love At First Sight, At Last Sight, At Ever And Ever Sight.

Some People—and I Am One Of Them—hate Happy Ends. We Feel Cheated. Harm Is The Norm. Doom Should Not Jam. The Avalanche Stopping In Its Tracks A Few Feet Above The Cowering Village Behaves Not Only Unnaturally But Unethically.

Life Is Just One Small Piece Of Light Between Two Eternal Darknesses.

In This Crazy Mirror Of Terror And Art A Pseudo-quotation Made Up Of Obscure Shakespeareanisms (chapter Three) Somehow Produces, Despite Its Lack Of Literal Meaning, The Blurred Diminutive Image Of The Acrobatic Performance That So Gloriously Supplies The Bravura Ending For The Next Chapter.

We Had Been Everywhere. We Had Really Seen Nothing. And I Catch Myself Thinking Today That Our Long Journey Had Only Defiled With A Sinuous Trail Of Slime The Lovely, Trustful, Dreamy, Enormous Country That By Then, In Retrospect, Was No More To Us Than A Collection Of Dog-eared Maps, Ruined Tour Books, Old Tires, And Her Sobs In The Night — Every Night, Every Night — The Moment I Feigned Sleep.

Another Tormentor Inquired If It Was True That I Had Installed Two Ping-pong Tables In My Basement. I Asked, Was It A Crime? No, He Said, But Why Two? Is That A Crime? I Countered, And They All Laughed.

All The Information I Have About Myself Is From Forged Documents.

He Was Afraid Of Touching His Own Wrist. He Never Attempted To Sleep On His Left Side, Even In Those Dismal Hours Of The Night When The Insomniac Longs For A Third Side After Trying The Two He Has.

A Change Of Environment Is The Traditional Fallacy Upon Which Doomed Loves, And Lungs, Rely.

I Think Like A Genius, I Write Like A Distinguished Author, And I Speak Like A Child.... My Hemmings And Hawings Over The Telephone Cause Long-distance Callers To Switch From Their Native English To Pathetic French. At Parties, If I Attempt To Entertain People With A Good Story, I Have To Go Back To Every Other Sentence For Oral Erasures And Inserts.... In These Circumstances Nobody Should Ask Me To Submit To An Interview If By "interview" A Chat Between Two Normal Human Beings Is Implied.

Style And Structure Are The Essence Of A Book; Great Ideas Are Hogwash.

I Know More Than I Can Express In Words, And The Little I Can Express Would Not Have Been Expressed, Had I Not Known More.

And Really, The Reason We Think Of Death In Celestial Terms Is That The Visible Firmament, Especially At Night (above Our Blacked-out Paris With The Gaunt Arches Of Its Boulevard Exelmans And The Ceaseless Alpine Gurgle Of Desolate Latrines), Is The Most Adequate And Ever-present Symbol Of That Vast Silent Explosion.

I Adore You, Mon Petit, And Would Never Allow Him To Hurt You, No Matter How Gently Or Madly.

While The Scientist Sees Everything That Happens In One Point Of Space, The Poet Feels Everything That Happens In One Point Of Time.

The Future Is But The Obsolete In Reverse.

Art At Its Greatest Is Fantastically Deceitful And Complex.

I Am Sentimental,’ She Said. ‘i Could Dissect A Koala But Not Its Baby. I Like The Words Damozel, Eglantine, Elegant. I Love When You Kiss My Elongated White Hand.

Do What Only A True Artist Can Do ... Pounce Upon The Forgotten Butterfly Of Revelation

Caress The Detail, The Divine Detail.

My Principal Failing As A Writer Is The Lack Of Spontaneity; The Nuisance Of Parallel Thoughts, Second Thoughts, Third Thoughts; Inability To Express Myself Properly In Any Language Unless I Compose Every Damned Sentence In My Bath, In My Mind, At My Desk.

A Certain Man Once Lost A Diamond Cuff-link In The Wide Blue Sea, And Twenty Years Later, On The Exact Day, A Friday Apparently, He Was Eating A Large Fish - But There Was No Diamond Inside. That’s What I Like About Coincidence.

Oh, Let Me Be Mawkish For The Nonce! I Am So Tired Of Being Cynical.

Human Thought, Flying On The Trapezes Of The Star-filled Universe, With Mathematics Stretched Beneath, Was Like An Acrobat Working With A Net But Suddenly Noticing That In Reality There Is No Net.

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.

We Loved Each Other With A Premature Love, Marked By A Fierceness That So Often Destroys Adult Lives.

We Hasten To Alienate The Very Fates We Intended To Woo.

There Is Nothing More Atrociously Cruel Than An Adored Child.

My Heart Was A Hysterical Unreliable Organ.

Life With You Was Lovely—and When I Say Lovely, I Mean Doves And Lilies, And Velvet, And That Soft Pink ‘v’ In The Middle And The Way Your Tongue Curved Up To The Long, Lingering ‘l.’ Our Life Together Was Alliterative, And When I Think Of All The Little Things Which Will Die, Now That We Cannot Share Them, I Feel As If We Were Dead Too.

A Philistine Is A Full-grown Person Whose Interests Are Of A Material And Commonplace Nature, And Whose Mentality Is Formed Of The Stock Ideas And Conventional Ideals Of His Or Her Group And Time.

By God, I Could Make Myself Bring Her That Economically Halved Grapefruit, That Sugarless Breakfast.

My Lolita Remarked: "you Know, What's So Dreadful About Dying Is That You Are Completely On Your Own"; And It Struck Me, As My Automaton Knees Went Up And Down, That I Simply Did Not Know A Thing About My Darling's Mind And That Quite Possibly, Behind The Awful Juvenile Cliches, There Was In Her A Garden And A Twilight, And A Palace Gate - Dim And Adorable Regions Which Happened To Be Lucidly And Absolutely Forbidden To Me, In My Polluted Rags And Miserable Convulsions.

Nothing Revives The Past So Completely As A Smell That Was Once Associated With It.

Do Not Be Awed By Giant Predecessors. Be Ill-tempered With Their Renown. Point Out Flaws. Frighten Interviewers From Time. Appear In Playboy. Sell To The Movies.

A Wise Reader Reads The Book Of Genius Not With His Heart, Not So Much With His Brain, But With His Spine. It Is There That Occurs The Telltale Tingle.

The Commentator May Be Excused For Repeating What He Has Stressed In His Own Books And Lectures, Namely That "offensive" Is Frequently But A Synonym For "unusual;" And A Great Work Of Art Is Of Course Always Original, And Thus By Its Very Nature Should Come More Or Less As A Shocking Surprise.

Knowing You Have Something Good To Read Before Bed Is Among The Most Pleasurable Of Sensations.

Man Exists Only Insofar As He Is Separated From His Surroundings. The Cranium Is A Space-traveler's Helmet. Stay Inside Or You Perish.

Occasionally, In The Middle Of A Conversation Her Name Would Be Mentioned, And She Would Run Down The Steps Of A Chance Sentence, Without Turning Her Head.

You Lose Your Immortality When You Lose Your Memory.

Just Like A Man Grieving Because He Has Recently Lost In His Dreams Some Thing That He Had Never Had In Reality, Or Hoping That Tomorrow He Would Dream That He Found It Again. That Is How Mathematics Is Created; It Has Its Fatal Flaw.

There Are Aphorisms That, Like Airplanes, Stay Up Only While They Are In Motion.

I Cannot Disobey Something Which I Do Not Know And The Reality Of Which I Have The Right To Deny.

The Breaking Of A Wave Cannot Explain The Whole Sea.

Breaking Promises

And Yet I Adore Him. I Think He's Quite Crazy, And With No Place Or Occupation In Life, And Far From Happy, And Philosophically Irresponsible – And There Is Absolutely Nobody Like Him.

And Presently I Was Driving Through The Drizzle Of The Dying Day, With The Windshield Wipers In Full Action But Unable To Cope With My Tears.

...in My Dreams The World Would Come Alive, Becoming So Captivatingly Majestic, Free And Ethereal, That Afterwards It Would Be Oppressive To Breathe The Dust Of This Painted Life.

Stirless, I Stand At The Window, And In The Black Bowl Of The Sky Glows Like A Golden Drop Of Honey The Mellow Moon

Turning One's Novel Into A Movie Script Is Rather Like Making A Series Of Sketches For A Painting That Has Long Ago Been Finished And Framed.

Alas! In Vain Historians Pry And Probe: The Same Wind Blows, And In The Same Live Robe Truth Bends Her Head To Fingers Curved Cupwise; And With A Woman's Smile And A Child's Care Examines Something She Is Holding There Concealed By Her Own Shoulder From Our Eyes.

Non-russian Readers Do Not Realize Two Things: That Not All Russians Love Dostoievsky As Much As Americans Do, And That Most Of Those Russians Who Do, Venerate Him As A Mystic And Not As An Artist.

We Are Most Artistically Caged.

Imagine Me; I Shall Not Exist If You Do Not Imagine Me; Try To Discern The Doe In Me, Trembling In The Forest Of My Own Iniquity; Let's Even Smile A Little. After All, There Is No Harm In Smiling.

Theoretically There Is No Absolute Proof That One's Awakening In The Morning (the Finding Oneself Again In The Saddle Of One's Personality) Is Not Really A Quite Unprecedented Event, A Perfectly Original Birth.

I Was The Shadow Of The Waxwing Slain/by The False Azure In The Windowpane.

Coordinating There Events And Objects With Remote Events And Vanished Objects. Making Ornaments Of Accidents And Possibilities.

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Francis Scott Key

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