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. |
Solitude is the play field of Satan |
Solitude is the playfield of Satan. |
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash. |
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea. |
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. |
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged -- the same house, the same people -- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated. |
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. |
The tiny madman in his padded cell. |
There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion. |
There is only one school of literature -- that of talent. |
To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute |
Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra - these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known |
Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra - these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known |
Treading the soil of the moon, palpitating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra - these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known |