I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.

That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.

I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel.

A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.

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.

I think she always nursed a small mad hope.