One was the common one with writers of his type: the bridging of the abyss lying between expression and thought; the maddening feeling that the right words, the only words are awaiting you on the opposite bank in the misty distance, and the shudderings of the still unclothed thought clamouring for them on this side of the abyss. He.
I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around.
Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses.
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.
I see the steam of the chocolate and the plates of blueberry tarts.
Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s and Bea Dante’s, and.
Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote’s ghost, poor Shade’s shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere – oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature – if there be any rules.
I am here through an error – not in this prison, specifically – but in this whole terrible, striped world; a world which seems not a bad example of amateur craftsmanship, but is in reality calamity, horror, madness, error – and look, the curio slays the tourist, the gigantic carved bear brings its wooden mallet down upon me.
And all these are worlds,” said Hagen. “Or else,” said Clements with a yawn, “a frightful mess. I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it.
To wonder at trifles – no matter the imminent peril – these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest form of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.
I can only explain my behaviour then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind.
One thing should be established once for all, indefeasibly. I loved, love, and shall love only you. I implore you and love you with everlasting pain and passion, my darling.
Once a perfect little beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and tighten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek.
I may as well confess that I gave Luzhin my French governess, my pocket chess set, my sweet temper, and the stone of the peach I plucked in my own walled garden.
And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain.
What was it – through everything terrible, nocturnal, unwieldy – what was that thing? It had been last to move aside, reluctantly yielding to the huge, heavy wagons of sleep, and now it was first to hurry back – so pleasant, so very pleasant – swelling, growing more distinct, suffusing his heart with warmth: Marthe is coming today!
The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know.
Before letting go he looked down. Some kind of hasty preparations were under way there: the window reflections gathered together and leveled themselves out, the whole chasm was seen to divide into dark and pale squares, and at the instant when Luzhin unclenched his hand, at the instant when icy air gushed into his month, he saw exactly what kind of eternity was obligingly and inexorably spread out before him.
You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this.
To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would – invariably, with icy precision – plump for the former.