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'Lolita' Quotes

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  • "Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject's displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case. Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose; in fact, it had become quite a habit with me of not being too attentive to women lest they come toppling, bloodripe, into my cold lap."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part One, Ch. 7

  • "Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!"
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part One, Ch. 8

  • "I owe my complete restoration to a discovery I made while being treated at that particular very expensive sanatorium. I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing them with fake "primal scenes"; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one's real sexual predicament."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part One, Ch. 9

  • "All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that 'princedom by the sea' in my tortured past. Everything between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders, and false rudiments of joy."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part One, Ch. 10

  • "No man can bring about the perfect murder; chance, however, can do it."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part One, Ch. 20

  • "Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part One, Ch. 20

  • "Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s and Bea Dante’s, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties?"
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part One, Ch. 25

  • "Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat. I was not really quite prepared for her fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style, and what is called goofing off — a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth — these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had!"
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch. 1

  • "We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch. 3

  • "I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch. 23

  • "I seldom if ever dreamed of Lolita as I remembered her--as I saw her constantly and obsessively in my conscious mind during my daymares and insomnias. More precisely: she did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball's bladder. I would bind myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-a-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch. 25

  • "It is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch. 25

  • "Solitude was corrupting me."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch. 25

  • "My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch. 25

  • "It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch. 29

  • "She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible -- and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary -- fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch. 29

  • "That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch. 36

  • "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."
    - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part Two, Ch. 36

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