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.

The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.

All colors made me happy: even gray. My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.

A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.

It is a singular reaction, this sitting still and writing, writing, writing, or ruminating at length, which is much the same, really.

I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.