Lolita Quotes
American novels, Russian novels, Metafictional works, Postmodern novels, Erotic novels
Top Quotes
“Her brown rose tasted of blood.”
“Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”
“Lolita is pornography, and we do not plan to review it.”
“Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book — all right then — a great book.”
“All of Nabokov's books are about tyranny, even Lolita. Perhaps Lolita most of all.”
“I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.”
“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.”
“Dying, dying, Lolita Haze,
Of hate and remorse, I'm dying.
And again my hairy fist I raise,
And again I hear you crying.”
“Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred days.
Profession: none, or "starlet".”
“My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English.”
“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.”
“Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book—the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real.”
“Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight eyes--for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate--while we moan and die.”
“Lolita is one of our finest American novels, a triumph of style and vision, an unforgettable work, Nabokov's best (though not most characteristic) work, a wedding of Swiftian satirical vigor with the kind of minute, loving patience that belongs to a man infatuated with the visual mysteries of the world.”
“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set...”
“Now I wish to introduce the following idea. 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); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as "nymphets."”
“Slate: Lolita at 50 - Is Nabokov's masterpiece still shocking? es:Lolita it:Vladimir Vladimirovič Nabokov#Lolita he:לוליטה pl:Lolita (powieść) ru:Лолита vi:Lolita”
“"Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male", such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. Humbert Humbert, their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start.”