“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”

“I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barredI would gather her in my arm...”

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”

“Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.”

“We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall Jo...”

“You have to be an artist and a madman...”

“Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.”

“... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.”

“Sometimes two people have to fall apart, to realize how much they need to fall back together.”

“Good literature is one key to peace. When we stop reading each other, when we stop paying attention to each other's words and stories, we too easily oppose one another.”

“There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the mystery novel and the novel, only between good books and bad books. A good book tak...”

“I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.”

“For some reason, I kept seeing itit trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retinaa radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, "pinging" pebbles at an empty can.”

“No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert Humbert-Lolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or ...”