Lolita Quotes

You know, you hear about these writers reading 'Lolita' at 12. I wanted to be a chemistry teacher. ~ Susan Barker

Is this where you reveal you're secretly a serial killer and you're taking me to where you're going to bury my body in a shallow grave? ~ Lolita Lane

On a Parisienne's Bookshelf
THERE ARE MANY BOOKS ON A PARISIENNE'S BOOKSHELF:

The books you so often claim you've read that you actually believe you have.
The books you read in school from which you remember only the main character's name.
The art books your parents give you each Christmas so you can get some "culture".
The art books that you bought yourself and which you really love.
The books that you've been promising yourself you'll read next summer … for the past ten years.
The books you bought only because you liked the title.
The books that you think makes you cool.
The books you read over and over again, and that evolve along with your life.
The books that remind you of someone you loved.
The books you keep for your children, just in case you ever have any.
The books whose first ten pages you've read so many times you know them by heart.
The books you own simply because you must and, taken together, form intangible proof that you are well read.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE BOOKS YOU HAVE READ, LOVED, AND WHICH ARE A PART OF YOUR IDENTITY:

The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
Belle du Seigneur, Albert Cohen
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
L'Écume des jours, Boris Vian
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand C ~ Caroline De Maigret

The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Suddenly, as Avis clung to her father's neck and ear while, with a casual arm, the man enveloped his lumpy and large offspring, I saw Lolita's smile lose all its light and become a frozen little shadow of itself, and the fruit knife slipped off the table and struck her with its silver handle a freak blow on the ankle which made her gasp, and crouch head forward, and then, jumping on one leg, her face awful with the preparatory grimace which children hold till the tears gush, she was gone - to be followed at once and consoled in the kitchen by Avis who had such a wonderful fat pink dad and a small chubby brother, and a brand-new baby sister, and a home, and two grinning dogs, and Lolita had nothing. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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 matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed." " ... Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here." "There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I am a Lolita. I do not believe in growing up. No matter how old I get, I shall remain devoted to ruffles and frills. ~ Novala Takemoto

Unattached details take all the sparkle out of your conversation. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.' ~ Salman Rushdie

He wrote to his father every day. His platoon called his dad a girlfriend. ~ Noorilhuda

Oh, Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe's and Bea Dante's, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties? ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart's buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes
que dis-je,of semi-extinct dragons!
while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time. So this was le grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties she had always been singularly absent-minded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked inafter satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher its sicher as my uncle Gustave used to say I would let myself into that "342" and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key "342" at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere,indeed, the globe that very same night. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students' hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer. ~ Azar Nafisi

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

In class, we were discussing the concept of the villain in the novel. I had mentioned that Humbert was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people. He had created the Lolita he desired, and would not budge from that image. ~ Azar Nafisi

She had read articles over the years about a man's supposed biological craving for young women: it was all about primeval procreation, in theory, the need to plant seed in fertile soil. Maybe ... She thought of a line from Nabokov: "Because you took advantage of my disadvantage." Lolita. In this case, however, Kristin felt that she was at the disadvantage - not the young thing. The truth was, she feared, all men were Humbert Humbert. Maybe they weren't pedophiles lusting after twelve-year-olds, but didn't Lolita look old for her age? Older, anyway? Sure, there were MILFs in porn, but Kristin had a feeling that considerably more men wanted their porn stars to be students at Duke University than moms from the bleachers at a middle-school soccer game. ~ Chris Bohjalian

She had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It's a long story that involves copious quantities of alcohol and Lolita. ~ Michelle Hodkin

But in my arms she was always Lolita. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I often reread passages of "Lolita" for its exquisite language. To me, "Lolita" has no message, no purpose, other than to exist as a marvel of literary creation. It has wit, intelligence and style. It pointedly makes no attempt to serve a higher moral purpose, and previous attempts by critics to find one have proven ludicrous. The annotated edition is accompanied by a brilliant afterword by Nabokov that is a lucid reminder of the pure joy of writing, its interplay with life. ~ Amy Tan

Prizing elegance, sweet emotions, and fantasy more than morals and truth; wallowing in fleeting romance rather than trying to give meaning to life, when who knows what's going to happen to you anyway; ignoring virtue and conventions to cherish only the pleasures you are definitely experiencing now: this is the Cocoro of Rococo. No matter how much deep thought, hard work, and agonizing effort went into coaxing out some insight, if that insight is boring, or not beautiful, it doesn't matter. And even if something is made just for laughs, if you find it pleasing, it has value. Other people's opinions and labor do not figure into your assessment; choosing things with your own personal sense of "I like this, I don't like that" is the ultimate individualism that sustains the very foundation of Rococo. Rococo, therefore, embodies the spirit of punk rock and anarchism more than any philosophy. Only in Rococo - elegant yet in bad taste, extravagant yet defiant and lawless - can I discover the meaning of life. ~ Novala Takemoto

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

Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell had quite different gifts, and their self-images were quite different. But, I shall argue, their accomplishment was pretty much the same. Both of them warn the liberal ironist intellectual against temptations to be cruel. Both of them dramatise the tension between private irony and liberal hope.

In the following passage, Nabokov helped blur the distinctions which I want to draw:

...'Lolita' has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann.

Orwell blurred the same distinctions when, in one of his rare descents into rant, "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda," he wrote exactly the sort of thing Nabokov loathed:

You cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from; you cannot feel dispassionately about a man who is about to cut your throat. In a world in which Fascism and Socialism were fighting one another, any thinking person had to take side ~ Richard M. Rorty

Music is a form that tends to give shape to rules, social mores, social attitudes, feelings - it does this in a very beautiful, fluid way. To me the issue of form and formlessness is most strong in the theme of mortality versus a human wish for immortality of a sort. Take, for example, the definition of beauty in fashion. Remember what Alison says at the beginning? She says when she was young she didn't know what beautiful was. She looked at this woman who everyone was saying was beautiful and she didn't even know what they were talking about. I experienced that when I was a child. If I loved someone I thought they were really beautiful. And then eventually, I began to get it, the social concept of beauty. Not that I think beautiful is completely imaginary, but beauty is so wide ranging and fluid. Yet there's a need to say: "This is what it is, and it's not changing; we're taking a picture of it to hold it still." It's like an impulse to put up a building meant to last forever. An urge to grab and hold something in place when nothing human can be grabbed and held in place. We come into these physical bodies . . . whatever we are takes this shape that is so particular and distinct - eyes, nose, mouth - and then it gradually begins to disintegrate. Eventually it's going to dissolve completely. It's a huge problem for people; we can understand it, but it breaks our hearts. And so we're constantly trying to pin something down or leave a trace that will last forever. "And this is ~ Mary Gaitskill

When The Journal of Words compiled its list of the one hundred best novels written in English, do you know that Pride and Prejudice was number twelve?" She stopped pacing and glared at Jane. "And do you know where Jane Eyre was?" she asked. She looked at the four of them in turn, but nobody answered her. "Number fifty-two!" she shrieked. "Fifty-two! Below that pornographic travesty Lolita!" She spat the title as if it were poison. "Below Huckleberry Finn! Below Ulysses. Have you ever tried to read Ulysses? Have you ever finished it? No, you haven't. No one has. They just carry it around and lie about having read it. ~ Michael Thomas Ford

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. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

And, most important, if you like shaving your entire region, and somebody tells you that it's wrong because it makes you look like a baby, that person is a lunatic. You are an adult woman who happens to have no pubic hair. You are not a Lolita. You are an adult woman. ~ Alida Nugent

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. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

History, lie of our lives, mire of our loins. Our sins, our souls. Hiss-tih-ree: the tip of the pen taking a trip of three steps (with one glide) down the chronicle to trap a slick, sibilant character. Hiss. (Ss.) Tih. Ree.
He was a pig, a plain pig, in the morning, standing five feet ten on one hoof. He was a pig in slacks. He was a pig in school. He was a pig on the dotted line. But in my eyes it's always the ones signing dotted lines that become pigs.
Did this pig have a precursor? He did, indeed he did. In point of fact, dating all the way back to the Biblical Age. Oh where? About everywhere you look there's pigs giving that fancy ol' snake a chase. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can always count on a fuckin' pretentious sarcastican for a fancy prose style. ~ Brian Celio

And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski; some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
'You know what's so dreadful about dying is that you're 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 ... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

A moment later I heard my sweetheart running up the stairs. My heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out. I hitched up the pants of my pajamas, flung the door open: and simultaneously Lolita arrived, in her Sunday frock, stamping, panting, and the she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitating darling! ~ Vladimir Nabokov

In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. 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. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. 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). ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The Girl Scout's motto is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as - well, never mind what. My duty is - to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I am cheerful. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word, and deed. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

There's no sweeter stench than the scent of a burning baby ~ Lolita Files

While you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Because of this.
Because your funny.
Because you know Lolita.
And Nabukov and James Mason too.
Because you're cute and funny and i'm kind of sad and you haven't tried hitting on me once.
Because you weren't even trying ... ~ Matt Fraction

And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy ~ Vladimir Nabokov

When you enter a beloved novel many times, you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived there. You try not to notice the party of impatient tourists trooping through the kitchen (Pnin a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon Lolita), or that shuffling academic army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a squirrel around the backyard (or a series of squirrels, depending on their methodology). ~ Zadie Smith

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 not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of "little girls" - not simply "young girls." Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and "sex kittens." Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his "aging mistress. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I've been trying to redefine fragrance since I was a child - before I was ten. Throughout my life, certain fragrance notes have captured my imagination - especially liquorice, violet and anise, flooding back into my consciousness. ~ Lolita Lempicka

I'm thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

How do you circumvent a mind bent upon lying to get away from the truth? ~ Noorilhuda

I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus! ~ Vladimir Nabokov

He also knew the language of The Klingons, but the army had no use for it. ~ Noorilhuda

Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand), the first single from Eat Me, Drink Me, features a video filmed by Titanic director James Cameron. In it, Manson croons to Wood, who – with bobbed hair, gloves and a demure frock – blankly masturbates in an audience of writhing lesbians, Manson's image reflected in her heart-shaped glasses. I wanted to like the song, but found Manson's threadbare voice and overdubbed music annoying, and the chorus - 'Don't break my heart/and I won't break your heart-shaped glasses' – suggested a pugilistic retribution ('Dump me, and I'll punch your lights out!') more in keeping with Norman Mailer than Nabokov. ~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Ummiye is currently working on a screenplay called "Footless on Her Own Feet." It tells the story of a handicapped girl whose fifty-year-old mother pushes her to school every day in a wheelbarrow. Eventually, she wins a national drawing contest, making a super-realistic picture of herself in the wheelbarrow. With the prize money, she buys a wheelchair. Like the Arslankoy theatre, the girl's drawing uses artistic representation to change the thing represented. By drawing a truthful picture of the humiliating wheelbarrow, she transforms it into a dignified wheelchair-- much as a theatre, by representing the injustice of village women's life, might make that life more just. Nabokov once claimed that the inspiration for Lolita was an art work produced by an ape in the Jardin des Plantes: a drawing of the bars of its cage. It's a good metaphor for artistic production. What else do we ever draw besides the bars of our cage, or the wheelbarrow we rode in as crippled children? How else do cages get smashed? How else will we stand on our own feet? ~ Elif Batuman

Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Aurora, you're a child, live like one, don't act like one. Enjoy the innocence, dump the immaturity. ~ Noorilhuda

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

Nabokov changed my life," Max said. "I was going to be a writer, and then I read Lolita and I decided to go to law school instead. It looked easier. ~ Leslie Daniels

I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

We must thank the Islamic Republic for making us rediscover and even covet all these things we took for granted: one could write a paper on the pleasure of eating a ham sandwich. And I said, Oh, the things we have to be thankful for! And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: parties, eating ice cream in public, falling in love, holding hands, wearing lipstick, laughing in public and reading Lolita in Tehran. ~ Azar Nafisi

I appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

This is what happens to those who sit still. People who did nothing ended up with nothing lives lived on nothing furniture inside a nothing space doing nothing watching nothing being nothing. They became supernovas of nothingness that turned into black holes of pathetic shit as they sank in on themselves and disappeared from existance. People like that were not even missed. ~ Lolita Files

i wore red lipstick to the grocery store last Monday
to buy a carton off eggs and so when the cashier told
me that my eyes reminded him of the ocean, i asked
if he's ever drowned in his own sadness, he said my
total was $1.89 and that he didn't know what i meant,
i payed in quarters and told him i was an Art major,
i told him my boyfriend was a musician and we were
saving up for an apartment in the city and how i'd
use the walls as canvases and how he'd play his
piano on Sunday mornings when the rain tasted like
salt, and i told him that i had my first art opening in
three weeks and he should stop by and i'd introduce
him to this friend i had named Lolita who was really
good in bed, he thought i was insane and i wonder
if he knew how many times i've cried in the shower
with my make up smeared and my eyes swollen shut,
he said "yeah, yeah, sounds good, have a nice day"
and i wonder if he'll ever know i wanted to really be
a poet and that's why when some man in the parking
lot asked if i had a lighter, i dropped my eggs while
stumbling to find one, and cried on the way home ~ Irynka

This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My Calender is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don't think I can go on. Heart, head
everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat til page is full, printer. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with! ~ Vladimir Nabokov

My heart seemed everywhere at once. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Aygi Cycle (4)

Coarse hawthorn
beloved uncle's
memory entwined

among its
gnarled and
armored limbs

copy of
Lolita by
his deathbed ~ Michael Palmer

In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee:
"Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight."
It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability - a most singular case, I presume - of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The biggest crime in Nabokov's 'Lolita' is imposing your own dream upon someone else's reality. Humbert Humbert is blind. He doesn't see Lolita's reality. He doesn't see that Lolita should leave. He only sees Lolita as an extension of his own obsession. This is what a totalitarian state does. ~ Azar Nafisi

I ask you, what would you do if you could erase one bad memory and retain all that was beautiful in your life? Would you not move heaven and earth - and get loads of therapy - to have that? ~ Noorilhuda

"offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual" ... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a glittering summit where laughing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting for her, for her. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

There was no Lo to behold. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Actually she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is "L". The suffix "-ita" has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy "L" and a long "o". No, the first syllable should be as in "lollipop", the "L" liquid and delicate, the "lee" not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in "Dolores." My little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze," where Irish mists blend with a German bunny - I mean, a small German hare. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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 conductive to attractiveness.
He is ponderously capricious.
Many of his casual opinions on people and scenery of this country are ludicrous.
A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning.
He is abnormal.
He is not a gentleman.
But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring it's author! ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita... is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive. ~ Orville Prescott

You talk like a book. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I try to cry, and can't, but even with dry eyes it's all so confusing. ~ Lolita Pille

My little cup brims with tiddles. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

With your little claws, Lolita. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

He-the Monster-is now dating someone whose name begins with "L". I think her name is Lola or maybe, possibly, Lolita. (Tiptoeing off the tounge. How lovely. Lovely Lola Lolita) The Monster, everyone say is much better now. He doesn't drink (I'm not around) and he doesn't smoke (I'm not around) and he doesn't stay out all night and ring "L's" doorbell at 4:30 in the morning (drunk and smoky). He's older, wiser and unwilling to go backward into that great abyss that reads me. ~ Kathleen DeMarco

I. Those of us born by water are never afraid enough of drowning. Bruises used to trophy my knees from my death-defying tree climb jumps. Growing up, my backyard was a forest of blackberry bushes. I learned early nothing sweet will come to you unthorned.

II. At twelve your body becomes a currency. So Jenny and I sat down and cut up all our clothes into nothing. That year I failed math class but knew the exact number of calories in a carrot stick. I learned early being desired goes hand in hand with hunger.

III. The last time I tried to scream I felt my father climbing up through my throat and into my mouth.

IV. There is a certain kind of girl who reads Lolita at fourteen and finds religion. I painted my eyes black and sucked barroom cherries to red my tongue. There was a boy who promised Judas really did love Jesus. I learned early every kiss and betrayal are up for interpretation.

V. I think he must have conferenced with my nightmares on exactly how to hurt me.

VI. He never broke my heart. He only turned it into a compass that always points me back to him. ~ Clementine Von Radics

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. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Drug addicts, especially young ones, are conformists flocking together in sticky groups, and I do not write for groups, nor approve of group therapy (the big scene in the Freudian farce); as I have said often enough, I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts. Young dunces who turn to drugs cannot read "Lolita," or any of my books, some in fact cannot read at all. Let me also observe that the term "square" already dates as a slang word, for nothing dates quicker than conservative youth, nor is there anything more philistine, more bourgeois, more ovine than this business of drug duncery. Half a century ago, a similar fashion among the smart set of St. Petersburg was cocaine sniffing combined with phony orientalities. The better and brighter minds of my young American readers are far removed from those juvenile fads and faddists. I also used to know in the past a Communist agent who got so involved in trying to wreck anti-Bolshevist groups by distributing drugs among them that he became an addict himself and lapsed into a dreamy state of commendable metempsychic sloth. He must be grazing today on some grassy slope in Tibet if he has not yet lined the coat of his fortunate shepherd. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls ... There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl. ~ Vladimir Nabokov