Lolita Nabokov Quotes

#1. The Girl Scout's motto is also mine. I fill my life with worthwhile deeds such as - well, never mind what. My duty is - to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I am cheerful. I am thrifty and I am absolutely filthy in thought, word, and deed.

Vladimir Nabokov

#2. Actually she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods.

Vladimir Nabokov

#3. There was no Lo to behold.

Vladimir Nabokov

#4. You talk like a book.

Vladimir Nabokov

#5. Good by-aye! she chanted, my American sweet immortal dead love; for she is dead and immortal if you are reading this.

Vladimir Nabokov

#6. Because you took advantage of my disadvantage.

Vladimir Nabokov

#7. I appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair.

Vladimir Nabokov

#8. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer.

Vladimir Nabokov

#9. While you took a dull doll to pieces and threw its head away.

Vladimir Nabokov

#10. Unattached details take all the sparkle out of your conversation.

Vladimir Nabokov

#11. The biggest crime in Nabokov's 'Lolita' is imposing your own dream upon someone else's reality. Humbert Humbert is blind. He doesn't see Lolita's reality. He doesn't see that Lolita should leave. He only sees Lolita as an extension of his own obsession. This is what a totalitarian state does.

Azar Nafisi

#12. My Carmen," I said (I used to call her that sometimes) "we shall leave this raw sore town as soon as you get out of bed." " ... Because, really," I continued, "there is no point in staying here." "There is no point in staying anywhere," said Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov

#13. With your little claws, Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov

#14. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

#16. I was a daisy fresh girl and look what you've done to me.

Vladimir Nabokov

#17. Nabokov changed my life," Max said. "I was going to be a writer, and then I read Lolita and I decided to go to law school instead. It looked easier.

Leslie Daniels

#18. I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.

Vladimir Nabokov

#19. Lolita should make all of us - parents, social workers, educators - apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.

Vladimir Nabokov

#20. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov

#21. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel.

Vladimir Nabokov

#22. I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring.

Marisha Pessl

#23. The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her

Vladimir Nabokov

#24. And the most poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the chorus.

Vladimir Nabokov

#25. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.

Vladimir Nabokov

#26. My mouth to him was a splendid cave full of priceless treasures, but I denied him entrance.

Vladimir Nabokov

#27. I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t'aimais, je t'aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.

Vladimir Nabokov

#28. For did it not mean I was losing my darling, just when I had secretly made her mine?

Vladimir Nabokov

#29. "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual" ...

Vladimir Nabokov

#30. Dying, dying, Lolita Haze,
Of hate and remorse I'm dying.
And again my hairy fist I raise,
And again I hear you crying.

Vladimir Nabokov

#31. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov

#32. And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy

Vladimir Nabokov

#33. Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov

#34. Leave your incidental Dick.

Vladimir Nabokov

#35. She had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

Vladimir Nabokov

#36. 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.

Vladimir Nabokov

#37. We all have such fateful objects
it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another
carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.

Vladimir Nabokov

#38. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov

#39. My heart seemed everywhere at once.

Vladimir Nabokov

#40. My little cup brims with tiddles.

Vladimir Nabokov

#41. Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!

Vladimir Nabokov

#42. I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls ... There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.

Vladimir Nabokov

#43. Queer, how I misinterpreted the designations of doom.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a glittering summit where laughing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting for her, for her.

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov

#49. My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.

Vladimir Nabokov

#50. My own ultraviolet darling. " Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

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

Vladimir Nabokov