"For some reason, I kept seeing it—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, "pinging" pebbles at an empty can."
- Vladimir Nabokov
"One last word,' I said in my horrible careful English, 'are you quite, quite sure that—well, not tomorrow, of course, and not after tomorrow, but—well—some day, any day, you will not come to live with..."
"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 els..."
"And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy"
"All I ever wanted, nira I expected: Nonette, upon whom my life pivots.The name I give my fire when I lay down, defenseless before its majestic awfulness.A little no, a little negation. A French girly ..."
- Julian Darius
"They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer ..."
"It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed."
"Good by-aye!" she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this."
"I saw the last piece of innocence unfurl inside of her.-Nick Plato (from the story Platonick)"
- L'Poni Baldwin
"Music is a form that tends to give shape to rules, social mores, social attitudes, feelings—it does this in a very beautiful, fluid way. To me the issue of form and formlessness is most strong in the ..."
- Mary Gaitskill