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.

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

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

...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.

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.

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.

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

Ink, a Drug.

We are most artistically caged.

Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. Listen, today we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous! We move in a gigantic, joyful world!

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.

And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him.

She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.

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

Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.

If a violin string could ache, i would be that string.

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.

Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.