“Every human being has, I believe, at times given room to the idea of creating a world himself. The Pope, in a flattering way, encouraged these thoughts in me when I was a young man. I reflected then that I might, had I been given omnipotence and a free hand, have made a fine world. [...]
We have the picture of you in mind, when you were young, posturing (for a photographer) in scarves (if you could have done it) but now, for none of you is immortal, ninety- three, the three, ninety and three, Mary, Ellen and Emily, what beauty is it clings still about you? Undying? Magical? For there [...]
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 where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not very many such books. Vladimir Nabokov, in the afterward of Lolita
I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of [...]
… my Lolita remarked: “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in [...]
When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the same things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man [...]
my love is building a building around you,a frail slippery house,a strong fragile house (beginning at the singular beginning of your smile)a skillful uncouth prison,a precise clumsy prison(building thatandthis into Thus, Around the reckless magic of your mouth) my love is building a magic,a discrete tower of magic and(as i guess) when Farmer Death(whom fairies [...]
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Me up at does out of the floor quietly Stare a poisoned mouse still who alive is asking What have i done that You wouldn’t have E. E. Cummings
CLYTEMNESTRA: You hate me, my child, but what disturbs me more is your likeness to me, as I was once. I used to have those clean-cut features, that fever in the blood, those smoldering eyes—and nothing good came of them. ELECTRA: No! Don’t say I’m like you! Tell me, Philebus—you can see us side by [...]
THE TUTOR: No memories, master? What ingratitude, considering that I gave ten years of my life to stocking you wit them! And what of all the journeys we have made together all the towns we visited? And the course in archeology composed specially for you? No memories, indeed! Palaces, shrines, and temples—with so many of [...]