Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done.
I loathe popular pulp, I loathe go-go gangs, I loathe jungle music, I loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories. I especially loathe vulgar movies – cripples raping nuns under tables, or naked-girl breasts squeezing against the tanned torsos of repulsive young males. And, really, I don’t think I mock popular trash more often than do other authors who believe with me that a good laugh is the best pesticide.
Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.
She looked around, loosened her bra, and turned over on her stomach to give her back a chance to be feasted upon. She said she loved me. She sighed deeply.
I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously; reveling in the new life-harmony which I was creating.
No matter how many times we read “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...
If told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary.
That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one’s individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out.
My heart seemed everywhere at once.
It’s exactly my sense of existing – a fragment, a wisp of color.
But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop?
He had liked her enormously, and he loved Krug with the same passion that a big sleek long-flewed hound feels for the high-booted hunter who reeks of the marsh as he leans towards the red fire. Krug could take aim at a flock of the most popular and sublime human thoughts and bring down a wild goose any time. But he could not kill death.
She was an extravagantly slender girl. Her ribs showed. The conspicuous knobs of her hipbones framed a hollowed abdomen, so flat as to belie the notion of “belly.” Her exquisite bone structure immediately slipped into a novel – became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems.
Listen – I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. 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. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life.
I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup.
He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, thought not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle.
I would fight of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.
Genius is non-conformity.
With your little claws, Lolita.
From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one’s interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.