Great Throughts Treasury

"Leave your incidental Dick."

"Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations."

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

"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."

"Leaving for a day or two that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is: a distant lone tree against golden heavens; ripples of light on the inner curve of a bridge; a thing impossible to capture."

"Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts."

"Let me repeat with quite force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow moving tall, with dark soft hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanour."

"Let us wait for the page proof."

"Life is a message scribbled in the dark."

"Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink ‘v’ in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering ‘l.’ Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too."

"Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canals black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness."

"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."

"Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both truth and art."

"Life is short. From here to that old car you know so we'll there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after."

"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him."

"Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. 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."

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. 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. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

"Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name."

"Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then it’s lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood."

"Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year 1919 a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Oh, Lolita, had you love me thus"

"Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind it is an incurable illness."

"Love is happiness, but only when you believe it will last forever. Even though every time it turns out to be a lie, it's only faith that gives love it's strength and it's joy."

"Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as great literature by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes."

"Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish."

"Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval."

"Measure me while I live - after it will be too late."

"Memory bothered him. They could hold out for a while and it's only from the perspective of an incurable disease, a clear premonition of impending death."

"Math anxiety: an intense lifelong fear of two trains approaching each other at speeds of 60 and 80 MPH."

"Memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it."

"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."

"Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl."

"Most of the dandelions had changed from suns into moons."

"Moreover, the slogan "highbrows and lowbrows, unite!", which he had spouted already, is all wrong since true highbrows are highbrows because they do not unite."

"Might it console you to know that I expect nothing but torture from her return? That I regard you as a bird of paradise?"

"Monstrously Remote: Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I immediately draw radii from my love—from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter—to monstrously remote points of the universe… the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time. – Speak Memory (1966)"

"Most people are so busy knocking themselves out trying to do everything they think they should do, the never get around to doing what they want to do."

"Mr. Goodman's large soft pinkish face was, and is, remarkably like a cow's udder."

"My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on ideas. Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the how above the what but do not let it be confused with the so what. Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent."

"My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like dental and transcendental (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream so seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why everything disintegrated at one furtive touch-- words, conventions of everyday life, systems, persons-- so, you know, I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world."

"My Carmen, I said (I used to call her that sometimes) we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed."

"My family despised Faberge objects as emblems of grotesque garishness."

"My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ."

"My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel which I dislike; and anyway it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves."

"My God died young. Theolatry I found degrading, and its premises, unsound. No free man needs God; but was I free?"

"My little cup brims with tiddles."

"My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting."

"My Lolita remarked: You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions…"

"My own ultraviolet darling. Lolita"

"My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys."

"My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English."