"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 John ..."
- Vladimir Nabokov
"Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely."
"Leave your incidental Dick."
"Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality the..."
- Azar Nafisi
"History, lie of our lives, mire of our loins. Our sins, our souls. Hiss-tih-ree: the tip of the pen taking a trip of three steps (with one glide) down the chronicle to trap a slick, sibilant character..."
- Brian Celio
"I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else."
"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 ..."
"... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple."
"I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never s..."
"For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (cu..."