Best Quotes from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov with Page Numbers

I was born in 1910, in Paris.

A salad of racial genes.

His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively.

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident.

...the sun of my infancy had set.

There are redolent remnants of day suspended.

I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity...of some of her rules.

She was poetically superstitious.

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees.

Everybody liked me, everybody petted me.

There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind... and the other when you instantly evoke... the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face.

Her parents were old friends of my aunt’s, and as stuffy as she. How I loathed them!

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.

We were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add.

Every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other.

These incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation.

Caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat glacé, and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified.

That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate.

I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers... came out of the sea.

I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity?

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

The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today.

Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine.

Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus!

Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards.

Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features.

A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock.

The haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me.

I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.

The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps.

I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in.

Paris suited me.

You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy...to discern at once, by ineffable signs, the little deadly demon among the wholesome children.

It is a question of focal adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount.

We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.

The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss.

One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly optimistic.

But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon child.

Let me remind my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and Young Person Act in 1933, the term 'girl-child' is defined as 'a girl who is over eight but under fourteen years'.

Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder.

But would it not tell sometime later?

She looked perfectly charming.

I could not help saying how very pretty she was.

I let myself go with her more completely than I had with any young lady before.

She looked tremendously pleased with the bonus of fifty I gave her.

It was less successful, she seemed to have grown less juvenile, more of a woman overnight.

So let her remain, sleek, slender Monique, as she was for a minute or two: a delinquent nymphet shining through the matter-of-fact young whore.

A cold I caught from her led me to cancel a fourth assignment, nor was I sorry to break an emotional series that threatened to burden me.

When I pushed the album away and somehow managed to blurt out my criminal craving.

I decided to marry.

Regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage... might help me... at least to keep them under pacific control.

A little money that had come my way... allowed me to enter upon my quest with equanimity.

Let me repeat with quiet force: I was, and still am, an exceptionally handsome male.

Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal.

Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose.

It had become quite a habit with me of not being too attentive to women lest they come toppling, bloodripe, into my cold lap.

My choice... was prompted by considerations whose essence was, as I realized too late, a piteous compromise.

All of which goes to show how dreadfully stupid poor Humbert always was in matters of sex.

Had I been a français moyen with a taste for flashy ladies, I might have easily found... creatures far more fascinating.

There is another man in my life.

Years of secret sufferings had taught me superhuman self-control.

We went to movies, bicycle races and boxing matches.

I felt my life needed a shake-up.

...life would be such an improvement on dull dingy Paris.

I sat with arms folded, one hip on the window sill, dying of hate and boredom.

But we never were.

These scientific products take of course some time to fructuate.

I hope they will be illustrated with good photographs when they do get printed.

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

I see them divided tidily into ample light and narrow shade.

A dreadful breakdown sent me to a sanatorium for more than a year.

I welcomed its desultory character and pseudoliterary aspects.

Robust outdoor life seemed to promise me some relief.

No temptations maddened me.

I felt curiously aloof from my own self.

My health improved wonderfully in spite or because of all the fantastic blankness and boredom.

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.

The sport was so excellent, its results—in my case—so ruddy.

I concocted a perfectly spurious and very racy report.

My work had begun to interest me again—I mean my scholarly exertions; the other thing, my active participation in my uncle’s posthumous perfumes, had by then been cut down to a minimum.

A bit of cigarette ash dropped from there in addition.

There was no question of my settling there.

I was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.

Women who are completely devoid of humor; women utterly indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible subjects of a parlor conversation.

I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery.

A blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses.

The twenty-five years I had lived since then tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.

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.

And these are my lilies.

I speak of this neat product of the Blank Blank Co., Blankton, Mass., as if it were really before me.

Every movement she made in the dappled sun plucked at the most secret and sensitive chord of my abject body.

It gives me a strange thrill to do so.

What drives me insane is the twofold nature of this nymphet—of every nymphet, perhaps.

I felt that my perception of her, if properly concentrated upon, might be sufficient to have me attain a beggar’s bliss immediately.

What is it that excites me almost to tears (hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)?

The tender anonymity of this name with its formal veil and that abstract transposition of first name and surname.

You could make out the formless sounds of remote traffic; a child calling 'Nancy, Nan-cy!'

She was the loveliest nymphet green-red-blue Priap himself could think up.

I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens.

How queer life is! We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.

The passion I had developed for that nymphet would have certainly landed me again in a sanatorium.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and how to do it, without impinging on a child’s chastity.

The promise Mrs. Haze had made was a fraudulent one.

The scheme remained daily the same.

For all the devil’s inventiveness, the scheme remained daily the same.

The reader has also marked the curious Mirage of the Lake.

Mrs. Haze had seen the whole situation very clearly.

We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.

A not too complicated event interfered with that program.

I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay.

So let us get started. I have a difficult job before me.

My heart beat like a drum.

What had begun as a delicious distension of my innermost roots became a glowing tingle.

...joy brewed within my body.

With the deep hot sweetness thus established... I felt I could slow down in order to prolong the glow.

The implied sun pulsated... we were fantastically and divinely alone.

Everything was now ready.

I was above the tribulations of ridicule, beyond the possibilities of retribution.

Let her stay, let her stay...

I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor.

What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita.

The afternoon drifted on and on, in ripe silence.

Let her come soon, I prayed, addressing a loan God.

I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child.

The elation with which the vision of new delights filled me was not horrible but pathetic.

To explain my grim mood, I had to use the same toothache I had already simulated in the morning.

It may curb Lo a little. I am afraid she has been bothering you frightfully all these days.

The camp will teach Dolores Haze to grow in many things—health, knowledge, temper.

And particularly in a sense of responsibility toward other people.

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

The word "forever" referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood.

How could I afford not to see her for two months of summer insomnias?

Two months of beauty, two months of tenderness, would be squandered forever, and I could do nothing about it.

One drop of rare honey, however, that Thursday did hold in its acorn cup.

Upon sundry sounds of departure reaching me, I rolled out of bed and leaned out of the window.

I hitched up the pants of my pajamas, flung the door open: and simultaneously Lolita arrived.

My heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out.

The motion of fate was resumed.

My palpitating darling!

I have loved you from the minute I saw you.

I am a passionate and lonely woman and you are the love of my life.

The situation, chéri, is quite simple.

Oh yes, you enjoy talking to me (and kidding poor me), you have grown fond of our friendly house.

If you decided to stay, ... that you want me as much as I do you: as a lifelong mate.

What a world of love I have built up for you during this miraculous June!

You who conceal your strongest feelings must think me a shameless little idiot for throwing open my poor bruised heart.

In years gone by, many disappointments came my way.

Pray for me—if you ever pray.

My first movement was one of repulsion and retreat.

Gentlemen of the jury! I cannot swear that certain motions pertaining to the business in hand—if I may coin an expression—had not drifted across my mind before.

After a while I destroyed the letter and went to my room, and ruminated, and rumpled my hair, and modeled my purple robe, and moaned through clenched teeth.

I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning (through the very grimace that twisted my lips) like a distant and terrible sun.

To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee and print on thy soft cheek a parent’s kiss …

The artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman.

I have considered it my artistic duty to preserve its intonations no matter how false and brutal they may seem to me now.

I would get her back as soon as a decent amount of time after the wedding had elapsed.

And now take down the following important remark: the artist in me has been given the upper hand over the gentleman.

The sun made its usual round of the house as the afternoon ripened into evening.

The dandelions perished. A reek of sap mingled with the pineapple.

My soi-disant passionate and lonely Charlotte was in everyday life matter-of-fact and gregarious.

Oh, she was very genteel: she said 'excuse me' whenever a slight burp interrupted her flowing speech.

Into the fifty days of our cohabitation Charlotte crammed the activities of as many years.

With the zest of a banal young bride, she started to 'glorify the home.'

My solemn exasperation was to her the silence of love.

Even my money shone in her eyes with the magic of my manliness.

I could almost feel the wretched thing cower in its reluctance to endure the bath of ecru and ocher.

The transformation improved her looks.

It was then I knew she was a woman of principle.

I simply can’t tell you how gentle, how touching my poor wife was.

Never in my life had I confessed so much or received so many confessions.

The sincerity and artlessness with which she discussed what she called her 'love-life,' from first necking to connubial catch-as-catch-can, were, ethically, in striking contrast with my glib compositions.

The more popular and platitudinous I made them, the more Mrs. Humbert was pleased with the show.

Oh, she simply hated her daughter!

I had to present her with an illustrated catalogue of them, all nicely differentiated.

It was really maddening.

With a brutality that otherwise never appeared in my loving wife’s mild nature, she attacked and routed such of Lo’s little belongings.

Her autobiography was as devoid of interests as her autopsy would have been.

I regarded as my child.

Little did the good lady dream that one morning when an upset stomach...

"The water, must have been quite cold."

"I have one most ambitious dream."

"The dazzling lake emerged."

"Oh, you cannot imagine what these women of principle are!"

"The fatal gesture passed like the tail of a falling star across the blackness of the contemplated crime."

"I could visualize myself slapping Valeria’s breasts out of alignment, or otherwise hurting her—and I could see myself, no less clearly, shooting her lover in the underbelly and making him say 'akh!' and sit down."

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior."

"This is the end."

"In silence I turned shoreward and gravely, dutifully, she also turned..."

"Thank God, not water, not water!"

Even in the most harmonious of households, as ours is, not all decisions are taken by the female partner.

I am not cross. I am not cross at all.

But I am one half of this household, and have a small but distinct voice.

It was a matter not of asking forgiveness, but of changing one’s ways.

A couple of days after the British Incident, I was sitting in a new and very comfortable easy chair.

Tenderly, she inquired if she were not 'interrupting'.

The little table was ugly, no doubt, but it had done nothing to her.

She gave me one of those wounded-doe looks that irritated me so much.

Remarkable how difficult it is to conceal things—especially when one’s wife keeps monkeying with the furniture.

I could surely devise some general means to assert myself in a general way that might be later directed toward a particular occasion.

You are a monster. You’re a detestable, abominable, criminal fraud.

Let us be civilized people.

I am leaving tonight. This is all yours.

You are ruining my life and yours.

It is all your hallucination.

Just because they came handy.

Think it over.

I shall bring you a drink.

Your name and hers were put in by mere chance.

The notes you found were fragments of a novel.

I rushed out. The far side of our steep little street presented a peculiar sight.

To the anatomical right of this car, on the trim turf of the lawn-slope, an old gentleman with a white mustache, well-dressed—double-breasted gray suit, polka-dotted bow-tie—lay supine, his long legs together, like a death-size wax figure.

The sun was still a blinding red.

But a few incidents pertaining to those four or five days after Charlotte’s simple death, have to be noted.

I was so drunk that I slept as soundly as the child who had slept in that bed.

Oh, my dearest, oh my… worse than if it had been a woman you kept.

I had a female cousin, a respectable spinster in New York. There we would find a good private school for Dolly.

But as I stood wide-eyed and flushed before the mirror, I immediately realized it would be madness on my part to have her in the house.

I had palpated the very flesh of fate—and its padded shoulder.

Adieu, Marlene! Fat fate’s formal handshake... brought me out of my torpor; and I wept.

Take care of yourself, kiss your daughter for me.

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

The shades—thrifty, practical bamboo shades—were already down.

My gloomy good looks should be kept in the mind’s eye if my story is to be properly understood.

Pubescent Lo swooned to Humbert’s charm as she did to hiccuppy music.

Adult Lotte loved me with a mature, possessive passion that I now deplore and respect more than I care to say.

Judge then of my alarm when a few seconds before I left... Jean, with her always trembling fingers, took me by the temples.

A clap of thunder reverberated throughout the house.

Everything was whirling and flying before the approaching white deluge.

Dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone.

One might suppose that with all blocks removed and a prospect of delirious and unlimited delights before me, I would have mentally sunk back, heaving a sigh of delicious relief.

Instead of basking in the beams of smiling Chance, I was obsessed by all sorts of purely ethical doubts and fears.

Might it not surprise people that Lo was so consistently debarred from attending festive and funeral functions in her immediate family?

I could not help fancying that somehow Dolly Haze had been informed already.

Would I ever dare take those steps?

I could not repress a shiver whenever I imagined my nudity hemmed in by mysterious statutes in the merciless glare of the Common Law.

I had the feeling that Charlotte, moved by obscure motives of envy and dislike, had added an inch here, a pound there.

There is a touch of the mythological and the enchanted in that large store where little sister can dream of the day.

Much too precious was each tiny plum, each microscopic planetarium with its live Stardust.

Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.

Some day, Lo, you will understand many emotions and situations, such as for example the harmony, the beauty of spiritual relationship.

I missed you terribly, Lo.

My duty is—to be useful. I am a friend to male animals. I obey orders. I am cheerful.

We loved the sings around the fire in the big stone fireplace or under the darned stars, where every girl merged her own spirit of happiness with the voice of the group.

When I tell you something, believe me.

If we did not get to the hotel soon, immediately, miraculously, in the very next block, I felt I would lose all control over the Haze jalopy.

I knew, of course, it was but an innocent game on her part... a split second before a highway patrol car drew up alongside.

With unfeigned surprise. 'Don’t drool on me. You dirty man.'

Look, let’s cut out the kissing game and get something to eat.

I had hoped the drug would work fast. It certainly did.

And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key "342" at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere,—indeed, the globe—that very same night.

Human beings, attend! I should have understood that Lolita had already proved to be something quite different from innocent Annabel.

The moralist in me by-passed the issue by clinging to conventional notions of what twelve-year-old girls should be.

The whole point is that the old link between the adult world and the child world has been completely severed nowadays by new customs and new laws.

But somewhere behind the raging bliss, bewildered shadows conferred—and not to have heeded them, this is what I regret!

Oh, winged gentlemen of the jury!

I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy.

In common parlance, I needed a drink.

All I would do—all I would dare to do—would amount to such a trifle …

Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say.

Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity.

After all, there is no harm in smiling.

A breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my thoughts.

Time and again my consciousness folded the wrong way, my shuffling body entered the sphere of sleep, shuffled out again.

Mists of tenderness enfolded mountains of longing.

The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets—not crime’s prowling ground.

But I still hoped she might gradually be engulfed in a completeness of stupor that would allow me to taste more than a glimmer of her.

It was she who seduced me.

I realized what she was suggesting.

A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets.

"I think he had rather stunned it, despite the 'fun.'"

"Nor had her temperament been roused by that filthy fiend."

"What sickening envy the lecherous fellow... would have experienced had he known that every nerve in me was still anointed and ringed with the feel of her body—"

"I settled the bill and roused Lo from her chair."

"When she was ready at last, I gave her a lovely new purse..."

"I braced myself and grinned, and waited for a squall."

"This was an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif..."

"It was she, however, who broke the silence:"

"You dirty, dirty old man."

"Get in and slam the door."

At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently.

We came to know—nous connûmes—the stone cottages under enormous Chateaubriandesque trees, the brick unit, the adobe unit, the stucco court.

But I did surrender, now and then, to Lo’s predilection for "real" hotels.

I relied on three other methods to keep my pubescent concubine in submission and passable temper.

A combination of naïveté and deception, of charm and vulgarity, of blue sulks and rosy mirth.

Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward to, for her to survive till bedtime.

I did my best for hours on end to give her the impression of 'going places,' of rolling on to some definite destination, to some unusual delight.

Not only had Lo no eye for scenery but she furiously resented my calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape.

Once she turned to little Eva Rosen, and so very serenely and seriously ... my Lolita remarked: "You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.”

And I honor her still, my precious, my uncontaminated little one, and all her light and darkness.

I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motel—clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love.

By and by, the very possibilities that such honest promiscuity suggested made me bolder.

A simple child, Lo would scream no! and frantically clutch at my driving hand whenever I put a stop to her tornadoes of temper.

In those days, neither she nor I had thought up yet the system of monetary bribes.

Every morning during our yearlong travels I had to devise some expectation, some special point in space and time for her to look forward to.

I did my best for hours on end to give her the impression of 'going places,' of rolling on to some definite destination.

Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness.

A great user of roadside facilities, my unfastidious Lo would be charmed by toilet signs.

I quote: the normal girl is usually extremely anxious to please her father.

This is the situation, this is the choice. Don’t you think that under the circumstances Dolores Haze had better stick to her old man?

Our tour was a hard, twisted, teleological growth, whose sole raison d’être was to keep my companion in passable humor from kiss to kiss.

Children will 'walk starry-eyed and reverently through this foretaste of Heaven, drinking in beauty that can influence a life.'

Comfortably robed, I would settle down in the rich postmeridian shade after my own demure dip, and there I would sit, with a dummy book or a bag of bonbons, or both, or nothing but my tingling glands, and watch her gambol.

How charming it was to see her, a child herself, showing another child some of her few accomplishments, such as for example a special way of jumping rope.

I would satisfy myself that the damned staff had at last finished cleaning up our cottage.

This sort of thing soon began to bore my so easily bored Lolita, and, having a childish lack of sympathy for other people’s whims, she would insult me and my desire to have her caress me.

Little Lo! Owing perhaps to constant amorous exercise, she radiated...some special languorous glow.

How sweet it was to bring that coffee to her, and then deny it until she had done her morning duty.

I had only to turn away for a moment...and Lo and Behold, upon returning, I would find the former, les yeux perdus.

In whatever town we stopped I would inquire, in my polite European way, anent the whereabouts of natatoriums, museums, local schools...to watch the children leave school—always a pretty sight.

Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident 'what d'you think you are doing?' was all I got for my pains.

For there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a nymphet.

Still, I dwelled deep in my elected paradise—a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames—but still a paradise.

Alas, I had not reckoned with a faint side trail that curled up in cagey fashion among the shrubs and rocks a few feet from us.

A couple of semitropical beaches on the Gulf, though bright enough, were starred and spattered by venomous beasties and swept by hurricane winds.

But in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes.

There was something like a polka-dotted pushball among the undergrowth.

As father to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure.

I know that I am a courageous man, but in those days I was not aware of it, and I remember being surprised by my own coolness.

With the quiet murmured order one gives a sweat-stained distracted cringing trained animal even in the worst of plights.

We want our girls to communicate freely with the live world around them rather than plunge into musty old books.

Words without experience are meaningless.

What do we mean by education? In the old days it was in the main a verbal phenomenon.

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things.

The position of a star is important, but the most practical spot for an icebox in the kitchen may be even more important.

But we do try to turn our backs on the fog and squarely face the sunshine.

Your delightful Dolly will presently enter an age group where dates, dating, date dress, date book, date etiquette, mean as much to her as business, business connections, business success, mean to you.

We are confronted by certain facts.

In the old days… you could have a child learn by heart a good encyclopedia and he or she would know as much as or more than a school could offer.

To put it briefly, while adopting certain teaching techniques, we are more interested in communication than in composition.

I prided myself on the exact temperature of my relations with them: never rude, always aloof.

God bless their tact!

Another time the loathsome creature accosted me with a welcoming whine—but I evaded her.

I had become adept at providing her with a big breakfast and warming up the dinner.

I often felt we lived in a lighted house of glass.

A nice mixture of poison and treacle.

I had also to be careful in regard to a Mrs. Holigan.

I remember her waylaying Dolly.

Her structural heap of books pressed against her stomach.

A sheepish frightened little smile flitting over and off her snub-nosed face.

For obvious reasons, I preferred my house to his for the games of chess we had two or three times weekly.

He looked like some old battered idol as he sat with his pudgy hands in his lap and stared at the board as if it were a corpse.

Sometimes, from where we sat in my cold study I could hear Lo’s bare feet practicing dance techniques in the living room downstairs.

only when she started jumping, opening her legs at the height of the jump, and flexing one leg, and extending the other, and flying, and landing on her toes.

It was every time a treat to see Gaston, his elephant eye still fixed on his pieces, ceremoniously rise to shake hands with her.

I would have hardly alluded to him at all had not his Beardsley existence had such a queer bearing on my case.

There he was, devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar.

and here was I.

I need him for my defense.

he was perhaps aware that I knew more about him than the burghers of Beardsley did.

I was weak, I was not wise, my schoolgirl nymphet had me in thrall.

With the human element dwindling, the passion, the tenderness, and the torture only increased; and of this she took advantage.

She proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to deny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without which I could not live more than a few days in a row.

Knowing the magic and might of her own soft mouth, she managed—during one schoolyear!—to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even four bucks.

O Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars.

I would cruise all around the school area and on comatose feet visit drugstores, and peer into foggy lanes, and listen to receding girl laughter in between my heart throbs and the falling leaves.

Eventually, she lived up to her I.Q. by finding a safer hoarding place which I never discovered.

What I feared most was not that she might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away.

I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood.

Help Wanted in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.

A word to fathers. Don’t frighten away daughter’s friend.

Why not make conversation with them? Draw them out, make them laugh and feel at ease?

If she breaks the rules don’t explode out loud in front of her partner in crime.

Don’t you want your daughter, now that her turn has come, to be happy in the admiration and company of boys she likes?

I was quite positive that as long as my regime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie.

There is nothing more conservative than a child.

I cannot be absolutely certain that in the course of the winter she did not manage to have, in a casual way, improper contacts with unknown young fellows.

I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.

On the whole she seemed to me better adapted to her surroundings than I had hoped she would be.

Above all—since we are speaking of movement and youth—I liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer Street on her beautiful young bicycle.

The only thing about you that is, kiddo …

Oh, she’s a doll.

I have often wondered what secrets outrageously treacherous Dolores Haze had imparted to Mona.

Using all the modulations, all the allure of manner and voice she was capable of...

A sudden odd thought stabbed me: was my Lo playing the pimp?

The child’s tonalities were still admirably pure.

It had been a riot.

She had a tremendous chocolate-brown mole on her womanish back.

My Lo...

I talked literature for a minute.

Her eye left me. She lapsed into thought—probably assumed.

You must understand—”

What worries me... is that both teachers and schoolmates find Dolly antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey.

I always thought of myself as a very understanding father.

The general impression is that fifteen-year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters.

All I mean is that biologic and psychologic drives... do not fall so to speak into a—into a rounded pattern.

Let us put our two heads together, Mr. Haze. What on earth is wrong with that child?

I beg your pardon, what zones?

Dolly is inclined to be, mildly speaking, impudent.

I am always fascinated... by the admirable way foreigners—or at least naturalized Americans—use our rich language.

And as soon as she was well again, I threw a Party with Boys.

Chic Dolly wore a nice gray dress with fitted bodice and flared skirt.

I was reminded of the dreadfully distant days when I used to brace myself to casually enter a room.

After they had all gone my Lo said ugh, closed her eyes, and dropped into a chair with all four limbs starfished.

I bought her a new tennis racket for that remark.

January was humid and warm, and February fooled the forsythia.

Other presents came tumbling in.

Her bicycle manner, I mean her approach to it, afforded me supreme pleasure.

She wanted to know if the guy noon-napping... was the father of the pseudo-voluptuous hoyden.

I said Grant Wood or Peter Hurd was good, and Reginald Marsh or Frederick Waugh awful.

I assumed the playlet was just another, practically anonymous, version of some banal legend.

In consequence I was under the impression... that the accursed playlet belonged to the type of whimsey for juvenile consumption.

I understand that finally, in utter disgust at this cocksureness, barefooted Dolores was to lead check-trousered Mona to the paternal farm behind the Perilous Forest to prove to the braggard she was not a poet’s fancy, but a rustic, down-to-brown-earth lass.

...that mirage and reality merge in love.

She was so healthily engrossed in 'problems of expression,' and so charmingly did she put her narrow Florentine hands together.

Can you remember what was the name of that hotel... where you raped me.

Oh, you know... the hotel where you raped me. Okay, skip it.

With a yelp of amorous vernal laughter she slapped the glossy bole and tore uphill.

I was so struck by the radiant tenderness of her smile that for an instant I believed all our troubles gone.

...one hand dreaming in her print-flowered lap.

"I want to leave school. I hate that school. I hate the play, I really do!"

"But this time we’ll go wherever I want, won’t we?"

"You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We always admire her as she passes by."

"To hell with the play! See what I mean?"

"I feel sort of romantic to-night."

"Oh, she had changed!"

"My heart was bursting with love-ache."

"This must stop or else anything may happen."

"Shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms..."

"I nodded. My Lolita."

You must be careful. There are things that should never be given up.

You should persevere.

You are a funny creature, Lolita.

Was it thanks to those theatricals that she had now outgrown her juvenile jaded airs and was so adorably keen to explore rich reality?

I experienced the queer lightness of dreams that pale but warm Sunday morning.

We are now setting out on a long happy journey.

A penny for your thoughts.

I remember you gave up Ramsdale for camp, and camp for a joyride.

But what is curious is that you dropped the whole thing only a week before its natural climax.

Try to be a little nicer to me, Lolita.

In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate’s way.

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 special significance for us.

It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories.

With rising appetite, Lo applied herself to the fruit.

What special suspicion could I have? None indeed—but those muddy, moony eyes of hers, that singular warmth emanating from her!

The sound of Charlotte’s last sob incongruously vibrated through me.

I remember as a child...gloating over a map of North America that had 'Appalachian Mountains' boldly running from Alabama up to New Brunswick.

I had rather dreaded that side trip, even though we had agreed not to make ourselves conspicuous in any way.

But even that miserable pump of mine seemed to be working sweetly.

I stood staring at the bare ankles of her sandaled feet, then at her silly face.

In order to break some pattern of fate in which I obscurely felt myself being enmeshed, I had decided... to spend another night at Chestnut Court.

There, snugly wrapped in a white woollen scarf, lay a pocket automatic.

I was now glad I had it with me—and even more glad that I had learned to use it.

A pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb.

We must remember that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father’s central forelimb.

Farlow, with whom I had roamed those remote woods, was an admirable marksman.

Though I must say not much of it could be retrieved for proof—only a little iridescent fluff.

Between those two sportsmen I of course was a novice and kept missing everything.

You lie here,” I whispered to my light-weight compact little chum.

I toasted it with a dram of gin.

I had hallucinations.

The driver behind me, with his stuffed shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked like a display dummy.

O lente currite noctis equi! O softly run, nightmares!

A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscross streets—at half-past-four P.M. in a factory town—was the hand of chance that interrupted the spell.

If he’s really a cop... the worst thing we could do, would be to show him we are scared.

It was the first time... she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood.

We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a day or two of lovely release.

I remember thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom.

Nature is stunned by the sights she sees.

Sometimes, you are quite revoltingly dumb.

Oh dear, life does fly.

I only know I was quite certain she had left me for ever.

In later years I have often wondered why she did not go for ever that day.

I told myself with a burst of furious sarcasm—un ricanement—that I was crazy to suspect her, that she would turn up in a minute.

And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement, groveling love, the hopelessness of sensual reconciliation.

It was indeed a pretty sight.

Look, Lo, I said quietly. Look well. Is not that a rather good symbol of something or other?

But I said nothing. I put the pad back, closed the compartment, and drove out of Wace.

I examined the right rear wheel. The base of its tire was sheepishly and hideously square.

Perhaps, I was losing my mind.

By permitting Lolita to study acting I had, fond fool, suffered her to cultivate deceit.

Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make-believe.

The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke.

There was nothing wrong or deceitful in the spirit of her game.

At match point, her second serve... would strike vibrantly the harp-cord of the net—and ricochet out of court.

Did I ever mention that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly? That she was only fourteen?

I felt I could rest from the nightmare of unknown betrayals within the innocence of her style, of her soul, of her essential grace.

I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games.

Oh, I would fight. Better destroy everything than surrender her.

It was a gorgeous day. Lolita!

Lo! Lola! Lolita!

There was an ecstasy, a madness about her frolics that was too much of a glad thing.

My organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water.

I came to know that the child, my child, knew he was looking, enjoyed the lechery of his look.

I sensed the musk of her excitement from where I stood.

A marvelous transformation took place.

He was no longer the satyr but a very good-natured and foolish Swiss cousin.

Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?

I started to say something, and then sat down on the grass with a quite monstrous pain in my chest.

And next morning I felt strong enough to drive on.

I could do nothing with the anguish of knowing Lolita to be so tantalizingly, so miserably unattainable and beloved.

I wondered if I should mention, with a casual chuckle, that my fifteen-year-old daughter had had a minor accident while climbing an awkward fence with her boy friend.

Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.

Despite liberal libations, I felt fairly numbed by the endless night.

It had been a great feat to come for I felt all hollowed out by the infection that by then was at work on me too.

My love was as hopeless as ever.

There is no point in staying anywhere.

Freedom for the moment is everything.

I paid what he thought was fair.

To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free man.

I devoted myself, after several unmentionable days of dashing up and down the relentlessly radiating roads.

I discovered at once that he had foreseen my investigations and had planted insulting pseudonyms for my special benefit.

This taught me to rely on myself alone.

He succeeded in thoroughly enmeshing me and my thrashing anguish in his demoniacal game.

We all admire the spangled acrobat with classical grace meticulously walking his tight rope in the talcum light.

He mimed and mocked me.

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

What a shiver of triumph and loathing shook my frail frame when, among the plain innocent names in the hotel recorder, his fiendish conundrum would ejaculate in my face!

The clues he left did not establish his identity but they reflected his personality.

But if looking for the fiend along a road I knew he had taken was such a complicated vague and unprofitable business, what could I expect from any attempt to trace unknown motorists traveling along unknown routes?

I had wanted to attend those projections and talks, but Dolly, as was her wont, had asked me not to, period.

It suddenly occurred to me that I was demented and was about to do something stupid.

I was losing my time and my wits.

It was absolutely preposterous.

Presently, I noticed a vague commotion.

He could not be the villain.

I had long severed all monetary relations with him.

Another attempt at identification was less speedily resolved.

It was absolutely preposterous.

I had reduced this image to the only concrete source that morbid cerebration and torpid memory could give it.

This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which... might be called “Dolorès Disparue.”

It is just possible that had I gone to a strong hypnotist he might have extracted from me and arrayed in a logical pattern certain chance memories.

I resolved first to settle some affairs of mine in New York and then to proceed to California for a thorough search there.

Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze? Why are you hiding, darling?

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

Oh Dolores, that juke-box hurts! Are you still dancin’, darlin’?

Happy, happy is gnarled McFate Touring the States with a child wife.

And again my hairy fist I raise, And again I hear you crying.

My car is limping, Dolores Haze, And the last long lap is the hardest.

And the rest is rust and stardust.

She was the sweetest, simplest, gentlest, dumbest Rita imaginable.

…she was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.

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.

Oh Mnemosyne, sweetest and most mischievous of muses!

I wondered if the last statement was true. All? Did they have for instance sidewalk grenadine?

What I lusted to get was the printed picture that had chanced to absorb my trespassing image.

Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was!

...I was literally gasping for breath, and one corner of the book of doom kept stabbing me in the stomach while I scanned and skimmed…

…give me rain, rain, rain on the shingle roof for roses and inspiration every time.

I sang her a wistful French ballad, and strung together some fugitive rhymes to amuse her.

Whenever that happened—whenever her lovely, loopy, childish scrawl was horribly transformed into the dull hand of one of my few correspondents—I used to recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my trustful, pre-dolorian past.

There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which made my wild delight also perfect.

Indeed, it may well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised.

Mes fenêtres! Hanging above blotched sunset and welling night, grinding my teeth, I would crowd all the demons of my desire against the railing of a throbbing balcony.

Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature’s reality, the deception was bearable.

Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me.

We are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind.

Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical.

He seemed particularly relieved to get rid of the Haze 'complications.'

I guess he’s going to be a big one. I guess he’ll come right for Christmas.

Ah-ah-ah, said its little door.

My blue block of ice for heart, a pill on my tongue and solid death in my hip pocket.

I checked the arrangement of my papers, bathed and perfumed my delicate body.

I was not able, alas, to hold my breakfast, but dismissed that physicality as a trivial contretemps.

The time was around two. My pulse was 40 one minute and 100 the next.

I had my little black chum with me.

I resolved to make myself especially handsome and smart.

a waste of withered weeds all around.

I consoled myself for having with me in my trunk some very exquisite clothes.

the ancient beast in me was casting about for some lightly clad child I might hold against me.

Life is very short.

Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now.

And we shall live happily ever after.

There are no strings attached.

I will shout my poor truth.

I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita.

I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth.

Thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshiped.

Even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face.

This may be neither here nor there but I have to say it.

My heart is basically sound despite recent diagnoses.

I was alone to enjoy the innocent night and my terrible thoughts.

Let me dally a little, he is as good as destroyed.

This furtive burg was not far from The Enchanted Hunters.

Every full second or so, into emerald life... but the pot could still be made out as a latent shadow teasing the eye.

How many small dead-of-night towns I had seen!

Cursing my plight, I took off my fancy clothes, changed into slacks.

The surrounding country, if any, was a black wilderness.

Utter weariness overtook me an hour later, in an anonymous little town.

I navigated back to Highway X and traveled on.

With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love.

A couple of years before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being.

I am infinitely obliged to him and the great Institution he represented.

Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find...nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her.

Unless it can be proven to me—that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac...

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

The moral sense in mortals is the duty we have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.

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

I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you.

Mid-twentieth century ideas concerning child-parent relationship have been considerably tainted by the scholastic rigmarole and standardized symbols of the psychoanalytic racket.

I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something.

What depths of calculated carnality, what reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and dissolving in human tears.

If you really wish to triumph in your mind over the idea of death.

For all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation.

Every limit presupposes something beyond it.

But the awful point of the whole argument is this.

Even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest.

The sunny noon was all eyes.

What a steep little street. What a profound avenue.

What romantic soul was playing the piano where no piano had plunged and plashed on that bewitched Sunday with the sun on her beloved legs?

I said something pleasant to her, meaning no harm, an old-world compliment, what nice eyes you have.

Quietly resurrected, Miss Opposite was being wheeled out by her nieces, onto her porch, as if it were a stage and I the star performer.

Feeling I was losing my time, I drove energetically to the downtown hotel.

Nothing had changed.

In the methodical manner on which I have always prided myself, I had been keeping Clare Quilty’s face masked in my dark dungeon.

My mouth was to him a splendid cave full of priceless treasures.

It is a delicious dream feeling.

I could not help seeing the inside of that festive and ramshackle castle in terms of 'Troubled Teens,' a story in one of her magazines.

At least, he was there.

I stopped in the shelter of the trees and abolished my lights to ponder the next move quietly.

My Lolita!

There was still a three-year-old bobby pin of hers in the depths of the glove compartment.

There was still that stream of pale moths siphoned out of the night by my headlights.

People were still going to the movies.

In a selenian glow, truly mystical in its contrast with the moonless and massive night.

A thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dishwater.

The next moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulation.

Because you took advantage of a sinner.

I knew your dear wife slightly.

Now drop that pistol like a good fellow.

Because you cheated me of my redemption.

There should be a poker somewhere, why don’t I fetch it?

You begin to bore me.

I am practically impotent, to tell the melancholy truth.

You’re dying anyway.

Now look here, Mac, you are drunk and I am a sick man.

Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet.

I might as well disregard the rules of traffic.

It was a very spiritual itch.

Traffic was light.

I derived an eerie enjoyment from my limpness and the absolutely reliable support given me by the police and the ambulance people.

One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs.

What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that.

The absence of her voice from that concord.

There are in my notes 'Otto Otto' and 'Mesmer Mesmer' and 'Lambert Lambert,' but for some reason I think my choice expresses the nastiness best.

Be true to your Dick.

And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.