The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.
Let all of life be an unfettered howl.
A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish – but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.
I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.
Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple – these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.
Dear Jesus, do something.
We are most artistically caged.
Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.
I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.
Her lips were like large crimson polyps.
Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.
Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness.
The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.
Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.