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.
See you soon my strange joy, my tender night.
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.
The weather this morning was so-so: dullish, but warm, a boiled-milk sky, with skin- but if you pushed it aside with a teaspoon, the sun was really nice, so I wore my white trousers.
I love you, my sun, my life, I love your eyes-closed- all the little tails of your thoughts, your stretchy vowels, your whole soul from head to heels.
He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire.
To her he would surrender the remnants of himself at the first trumpet blast of destiny.
The one who kills is always his victim’s inferior.
No free man needs a God; but was I free?
And blood-black nothingness began to spin. A system of cells interlinked, within cells interlinked, within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.
The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.
I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.
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?
Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s reality – the deception was bearable.