Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal.
When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.
I noticed with a spasm of fierce disgust that the former Counselor of the Tsar, after thoroughly easing his bladder, had not flushed the toilet. That solemn pool of alien urine with a soggy, tawny cigarette butt disintegrating in it struck me as a crowning insult, and I wildly looked around for a weapon.
Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man in the tale.
The fatal gesture passed like the tail of a falling star across the blackness of the contemplated crime.
Russia – the country of Tolstoy, Stanislavski, Raskolnikov, and other great and good men.
Yet I have known madness not only in the guise of an evil shadow. I have seen it also as a flash of delight so rich and shattering that the very absence of an immediate object on which it might settle was to me a form of escape.
I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.
Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither.
In a word, before such an Amazing Offer, before such a vastness and variety of vistas, I was as helpless as Adam at the preview of early oriental history, miraged in his apple orchard.
A writer is lost when he grows interested in such questions as ‘what is art?’ and ’what is an artist’s duty?
Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her.
I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.
The moral sense in mortals is the duty We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.
I would moreover submit that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them by giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known.
Humbert era perfectamente capaz de tener relaciones con Eva, pero suspiraba por Lilith.
I could not bring myself to touch him in order to make sure he was really dead. He looked it: a quarter of his face gone, and two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck.
I adore her so horribly. No: ‘horribly’ is the wrong word. The elation with which the vision of new delights filled me was not horrible but pathetic. I qualify it as pathetic. Pathetic – because despite the insatiable fire of my venereal appetite, I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child. And.
They must have been glorious time together, those two. And it is hard to believe that the warmth, the tenderness, the beauty of it has not been gathered, and it is not treasured somewhere, somehow, by some immortal witness of mortal life.
The decrees of society are temporary ones; what Tolstoy is interested in are the eternal demands of morality.