Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.

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.

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.

...in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life.

...(hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)...

Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.

Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

One is always at home in one's past...

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.

My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.

Oh, don't cry, I'm so sorry I cheated so much, but that's the way things are.

Theoretically there is no absolute proof that one's awakening in the morning (the finding oneself again in the saddle of one's personality) is not really a quite unprecedented event, a perfectly original birth.

I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling

A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.

Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.

Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.

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

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.

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.

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

He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.

I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.

Be true to your Dick.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane...

The square root of I is I.

Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?

But in my arms she was always Lolita.

There is no science without fancy and no art without fact.

I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.

The lost glove is happy.

There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.

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.

Do what only a true artist can do ... pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation

Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.

…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.

...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.

All religions are based on obsolete terminology.

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

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

What surprises you in life? The marvel of consciousness -- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.

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.

To begin with, let us take the following motto...Literature is Love. Now we can continue.

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!