Memorable Quotes from Lolita: Exploring Nabokov’s Masterpiece
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
And the rest is rust and stardust.
You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy.
I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.
Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat.
I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth.
She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them.
But in my arms she was always Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my sins. My soul. My sin.
I am only a brute fond of the whispering, rustling, seething cinema.
She believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that appeared in Movie Love or Screen Land.
Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice.
Her body was such that the physical possibilities it offered to my adult libido appeared as infinite as those of a picture seen in the concave and convex aspects of a circular mirror.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
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.
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.
And the rest is rust and stardust.
You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame aglow in your subtle spine.
She believed, with a kind of celestial innocence, in a booming prosperity that would last and last.
There is no sweeter sound on earth than that of your own name spoken in the accent of a gentle unilateral love.
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
But in my arms, she was always Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lolita.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.
And the rest is rust and stardust.
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 somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.
I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.
I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.
We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac).
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.
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.
Do not let other authors’ materials evade you. Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.
He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
I am not concerned with so-called ‘sex’ at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets.
What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart was the secret knowledge that Lolita was not a nude, but a covered nymph.
Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture.
Reality is more important than the dream.