Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas.
The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave’, as a poet might have said. But I am not poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.
I mesmerized him with it, I saturated him with my vision, I pressed upon him, with a drunkard’s wild generosity, all that I was helpless myself to put into verse.
To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling – oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss.
If I broke her heart, her image of me would break too.
One Cincinnatus was counting, but the other Cincinnatus had already stopped heeding the sound of the unnecessary count which was fading away in the distance; and, with a clarity he had never experienced before – at first almost painful, so suddenly did it come, but then suffusing him with joy, he reflected: why am I here? Why am I lying like this? And, having asked himself these simple questions, he answered them by getting up and looking around.
I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you.
It was high time I destroyed him, but he must understand why he was being destroyed.
Humbert the Terrible deliberated with Humbert the Small whether Humbert Humbert should kill her or her lover, or both, or neither.
He excused himself saying he felt out of sorts, and continued to clean the bowl of his pipe as fiercely as if it were my heart he was hollowing out.
Freedom for the moment is everything.
Well, you haven’t kissed me yet, have you.
The evening is the time to praise the day.
You who conceal your strongest feelings must think me a shameless little idiot for throwing open my poor bruised heart like this.
Say, wouldn’t Mother be absolutely mad if she found out we were lovers.
Here, I’ll tell you – with my love I could have filled ten centuries of fire, songs, and valour – ten whole centuries, enormous and winged, – full of knights riding up blazing hills – and legends about giants – and fierce Troys – and orange sails – and pirates – and poets.
I said nothing. I pushed her softness back into the room and went in after her. I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped the rest of her, I tore off her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I traveled upon was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a madman’s fancy.
I think there must exist a special subversive group of pseudo-cupids – plump hairless little devils whom Satan commissions to make disgusting mischief in sacrosanct places.
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing... I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.
I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a spacetraveller’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.