I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. ... 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.

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

The future is but the obsolete in reverse.

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

Dear Jesus, do something.

The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.